Coming Up Trumps

‘An absolute blast‘ Spectator In this characteristically trenchant memoir, the indomitable Jean Trumpington looks back on her long and remarkable life. The daughter of an officer in the Bengal Lancers and an American heiress, Jean Campbell-Harris was born into a world of considerable privilege, but the Wall Street Crash entirely wiped out her mother‘s fortune. With the outbreak of the Second World War she became a land girl and later worked in naval intelligence at Bletchley Park. After the war Jean moved to New York, working on Madison Avenue with advertising‘s ‘mad men‘. It was here that she met the historian Alan Barker, and their marriage, in 1954, ushered in the happiest period of her life. The Seventies saw Jean Barker, as she then was, begin a distinguished political career, becoming a Cambridge City councillor, Mayor of Cambridge and then, in 1980, a life peer. Forthright, witty and deliciously opinionated, Coming Up Trumps is a wonderfully readable account of a life very well lived. ‘Shut your eyes - this is one of the acid tests of a good memoir - and you can almost hear the baroness in full flow, holding forth over a whisky in a bar in the House of Lords . . . Splendidly self-deprecatory‘ Sunday Telegraph ‘A dazzling romp . . . Like Nancy Mitford but with a heart‘ Charlotte Heathcote, Sunday Express