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entrepreneurs like you. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup. Hello and welcome to Battleground 44 with me, Patrick Bishop.

Our subject today is not an event, the sort of thing we usually cover, but a person, a woman whose life reads like a story that have submitted as a series

idea to a Netflix commissioning editor would surely be rejected as too unbelievable to work.

This lady was extraordinary. Despite having no paper qualifications, and for much of her life,

no official position, she can fairly be said to have exercised an enormous influence on world events,

and in particular the course of the Second World War.

Many of the labels that men of the time attached to women who challenged their authority

and what they saw as the natural order of things were plastered all over her.

She was a fan fatal, a courtesan,

the seductress of the century, if you were being polite, or that red-headed tart, if you weren't.

Yet, Winston Churchill knew her worth and used her as a vital player in the human diplomacy

that played such a large part in forging the relationships that produced the

alliance that defeated Hitler and the Nazis. I'm talking, of course, about Pamela Harriman,

to give her the name she died with. And here to talk with me about her is Sonia Pennell,

former journalist, now historian, and author of fine biographies of Clementine Churchill

and the British wartime spy Virginia Hall. She also wrote the first serious biography,

I should mention, of Boris Johnson, with whom she shared an office in Brussels when they were

...