contribute to the magazine was the cookery writer Elizabeth David, whose recipes became very influential in the 1950s. Through Weidenfeld she also became a close friend of Marcus Sieff, later chairman of the retailer Marks and Spencer. As a result of this eclectic early career, she widened her circle of friends and contacts beyond those in society and politics with whom she already had close connections. As one of Anthony Eden's biographers put it, she was "equally at home in the worlds of Hatfield and Fitzrovia", while a reviewer of her memoir wrote that "few lives can have touched so many social worlds, or graced them so elegantly". Even so, the future Lady Avon did not impress everyone: after the future prime minister Margaret Thatcher met her at a Conservative Party ball in 1954, she wrote dismissively to her sister, "Mrs Anthony Eden received us. Really she is a most colourless personality". 2007 memoir Glimpses of Spencer-Churchill's life as a single woman, for example, in diaries and other reminiscences, are quite extensive. Although she had indicated to the former Labour member of Parliament (MP) Woodrow Wyatt that no memoir of her own would appear until after her death, a volume, edited by Cate Haste, was nevertheless published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 2007, and Phoenix brought out a paperback edition in 2008. In 2004 Haste had collaborated with Cherie Booth, wife of the then prime minister Tony Blair, to produce a biographical chapter about Lady Avon as part of a wider study of prime ministerial spouses. Avon noted that after meeting Haste she realised that the latter's "enthusiasm and professionalism could make it possible". A photograph on the dust jacket of her memoir, depicting a young, pensive Spencer-Churchill, cigarette in hand, conveyed an alluring and slightly Bohemian image. The book was generally well-received by critics and even generated an engaging "spoof" in the satirical magazine Private Eye ("In the early 1950s I married Anthony Eden, a politician of above average height, with a prominent moustache ..."). Historian Andrew Roberts described it as "the last great British autobiography of the pre-war and wartime era", while art critic John McEwen remarked on its "witty and elegant restraint". Friends and acquaintances Early admirers Having lost both parents by her mid-twenties, Spencer-Churchill was comparatively independent for a young woman of her time. In later years she remarked to Woodrow Wyatt on "how much more