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Reflected Glory: The Life of Pamela Churchill Harriman, by Sally Bedell Smith (Simon & Schuster, 560 pp., $30)

WHETHER a biography is regarded as hostile or merely candid largely depends, no doubt, on the reader’s view of its subject. Sally Bedell Smith’s exhaustive biography of Pamela Harriman will not please Mrs. Harriman, we may be sure: but it simply unfolds an extraordinary life, making no moral judgments—unless you consider it judgmental to describe someone as a courtesan and say that she continually “embroiders” the truth about her past.

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Anthony Lejeune

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Reflected Glory: The Life of Pamela Churchill Harriman, by Sally Bedell Smith (Simon & Schuster, 560 pp., $30)

WHETHER a biography is regarded as hostile or merely candid largely depends, no doubt, on the reader’s view of its subject. Sally Bedell Smith’s exhaustive biography of Pamela Harriman will not please Mrs. Harriman, we may be sure: but it simply unfolds an extraordinary life, making no moral judgments—unless you consider it judgmental to describe someone as a courtesan and say that she continually “embroiders” the truth about her past.