Tall, blonde, beautiful, ruthless, brave and amoral to her fingertips (many of this biography’s paragraphs end with ‘The two became lovers’), Clare Consuelo Sheridan was extraordinary – especially for the era in which she lived. Her mother, Clara, was the eldest and fluffiest of the three Jerome sisters who arrived in England in the first wave of American heiresses aiming to marry into the peerage. Her father, Moreton Frewen, was a man so mesmerically gifted with the power of persuading his friends to invest in his catastrophic schemes that he was nicknamed ‘Mortal Ruin’. Winston Churchill was her first cousin (his mother, Jennie, was the youngest Jerome sister), Consuelo (née Vanderbilt), Duchess of Marlborough, was Clare’s godmother, and most of the beau monde were family friends.

At her debut in society, Clare (born in 1885) was under strict instructions from her father to marry a rich (and presumably gullible) man. She failed, and was sent in disgrace to stay in Ireland with the third Jerome sister, Leonie. By now, so indebted had the family become that Moreton pressured his children into transferring their Jerome inheritance to him (inevitably, it disappeared). Soon even the oak panelling from the bedrooms in the family home, Brede Place, had been stripped and sold. Clare later wrote how, aged 23, sitting at a smart dinner party she ‘looked around the table at the brilliant, bejewelled company, all laughing and lighthearted and I wanted to cry… I returned home with my soul in rebellion’.

Good riddance, Monty Don

Andy Burnham resembled an extreme train enthusiast at PMQs

Britain’s sanctions against Israel will backfire

In 1910, aged 25,........

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