Lady Pamela Berry: Passion, Politics and Power

(Hardback)

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This is a biography lightened with the intimate tone of a social memoir, about a woman who was both a bystander and protagonist through some fifty years of twentieth-century British history. Pamela Berry was the daughter of the buccaneering and brilliant politician and lawyer, FE Smith, the first Earl of Birkenhead, and married the son of another self-made man, William Berry from South Wales, who became Viscount Camrose and the owner of a group of national newspapers, including the Daily Telegraph. She had an unusually glamorous and precocious childhood, spoiled by her adoring father, and much photographed by Cecil Beaton. In her prime she used her position as a newspaper proprietors wife to become the most famous political and press hostess of her generation, harnessing her beauty and wit to influence successive governments, and was accused of wielding petticoat power during the Suez crisis. She had a decade-long affair with Malcolm Muggeridge, became a vigorous promoter of British fashion, dragging it out of the dowdy fifties, and in later life was active in the museum world. Harriet Cullen has opened a window back into the remarkable story of her mothers life from a rich cache of family diaries and letters, interweaving them with many other unpublished sources. It is revealing, in turns scathing and admiring, but always entertaining.

Reviews

A terrific read, superbly crafted, which illuminates a woman and an age. Pamela Berry was a child of the 20s, a glittering It Girl who soared in the 30s and became a Fleet Street hostess who stirred the political pot, a scourge of Tory leaders, a passionate lover, a figurehead of British fashion, and an intriguer in the museum world. Harriet Berrys book is not just a rich and searching portrait of her mother, but a vivid piece of social history. I wanted more. LADY ANTONIA FRASER

Author Bio

Harriet Cullen is a freelance writer and has contributed to History Today, the Daily Telegraph, the Keats-Shelley Review and Starhaven Press. She is married to the Argentine novelist Martn Cullen, has two sons, and lives between Argentina and London. For many years she was Chair of the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association.