Dancing with the Devil

ROGER MOORHOUSE is impressed by a book that traces the fortunes of the diplomats charged with managing the west's wartime alliance with Josef Stalin

- ROGER MOORHOUSE

In an age of history-writing seemingly chock full of reassessments, regurgitations and 're-imaginings', it is satisfying to review a book that is based on a genuinely new archival source. Giles Milton's The Stalin Affair uses as its core the papers of Kathleen Harriman daughter of the flamboyant millionaire Averell Harriman - to give a precious insight into wartime inter-Allied relations.

They tell a fascinating tale.

Kathleen - or Kathy, as she was known - was barely 23 and leading the life of an ordinary socialite, when her father called her to join him in London in the spring of 1941.

Averell Harriman had been sent to the British capital by President Franklin D Roosevelt to smooth Anglo-American relations, as the US slid inexorably towards active participation in the European war.

Harriman dashing, handsome and intellectually acute - would become one of the most significant movers and shakers in the Allied cause: a trusted adviser to Roosevelt, a regular at Chequers, a man for whom every diplomatic and political door, it seemed, was open. This was the world into which he brought Kathy - a "lively brunette with a forthright manner" - in the hope that it would be the making of her. She would spend the next four years as an observer at the very top table of Allied diplomacy.

Throughout that period, she would be no mere passenger. Despite her tender years, she worked first as a journalist, and when she wasn't weekending with the Churchills or dining with Lord Beaverbrook, she was touring Britain's bombed-out suburbs writing copy for British dailies or American weeklies. In time, she accompanied her father to Moscow - where he was appointed US ambassador and where she would serve as his unofficial aide and assistant, participating both in the social whirl and the political maelstrom that ensued.