Rather like the girls in Edith Wharton's The Buccaneers, the Langhorne sisters were a group of Americans who at the end of the last century not so much launched as threw themselves on society and swept up a sequence of husbands between them. The most famous of the siblings was Nancy, who through her second marriage to Waldorf Astor became chatelaine of Cliveden in England and the first woman to take her seat in the British House of Commons. But as James Fox, grandson of Phyllis Langhorne, shows, the other sisters led lives just as fascinating. Author of White Mischief, he finds here another terrific story to tell, with characters who might have been invented had Henry James ever written a pot-boiler.