Coming up trumps - Jean Trumpington

Forthright, witty and deliciously opinionated, Jean Trumpington's Coming Up Trumps is a spirited account of a life very well lived.

In this characteristically incisive 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 led an early life of luxury - until the Wall Street Crash wiped out her family's fortune.

At fifteen, Jean was sent to Paris to study but two years later, with the outbreak of the Second World War, she became a land girl. But Jean sought adventure and soon found it while working in Navy Intelligence throughout the war. Her post-warr life took her from the glamour of Paris to the 'mad men' of Madison Avenue. It was here that she met her husband, the historian Alan Barker, and their marriage, in 1954, ushered in the happiest period of her life before embarking on her distinguished political career, as a Cambridge City councillor, Mayor of Cambridge and, then, in 1980, a life peer.