In Ask Not (Mudlark £25) Maureen Callahan reveals a murky side of Camelot, namely the way the Kennedy clan mistreated its women. JFK’s tragic affair with Marilyn Monroe was an eerie echo of his father’s with silent star Gloria Swanson in the 1920s. And Jack Kennedy’s brothers Bobby and Teddy and his son JFK Jr all had disastrous relationships with women. Jack Kennedy’s sisters Rosemary and Kathleen were treated abominably, the former on account of her mental incapacity and the second for daring to marry a non-Catholic. ‘Kennedy men have been valorised for nearly a century’, writes Callahan in the book’s prologue. ‘But the women they’ve broken, tormented, raped, murdered, or left for dead have never really been part of their legacy’.

Another president with film connections was Ronald Reagan. In Reagan: His Life and Legend by Max Boot (Norton £35) readers are reminded that Reagan and Trump were the only American presidents to have their own TV show. Reagan was a pretty dud actor in the 1940s; a third-rate Errol Flynn appearing in a series of forgettable westerns and war films. His acting can best be described as balsa. But his presidency, it’s argued by Boot, helped usher in the dangers of The Donald: an empty-headed mouthpiece for crazy, ill-informed ideas.

In 1983 Reagan sent ill-prepared US Marines to Lebanon as part of a multi-national peacekeeping mission only to see more than 200 of them killed in a huge truck bombing. Public pressure forced him to withdraw from Lebanon within a few months. Reagan became governor of California in 1966 and his later presidency helped shape the ‘greed is good’ 1980s. He was never the brightest crayon in the box and, like Trump, relied on aides and like-minded yes-men senators to take his hand.

Holding Reagan accountable ‘felt like trying to convict a squirrel for trespassing’ writes historian Daniel Immerwahr. Iran Contra, in bed with Thatcher, and his bungling of Aids healthcare, were just some of Reagan’s blunders.

Pamela Churchill Harriman was a woman who grabbed life by the throat. She was as at home with movie people as politicians. She had film-star looks and in 1960 married her second husband the Hollywood agent and Broadway producer Leland Hayward. It was a relationship complicated by his troubled children from a previous marriage. Leland Hayward managed stars like Fred Astaire and Judy Garland and he once dated Katherine Hepburn. In 1961 Pamela’s stepdaughter Brooke Hayward married the maverick actor Dennis Hopper much against Pamela’s wishes. Brooke later wrote a tell-all memoir about her dysfunctional family.

Sonia Purnell’s Kingmaker (Virago £25) is a heroically-researched biography of sex, politics and star power that sets out Harriman’s place in modern history. ‘Pamela is almost forgotten now but she was arguably the most famous diplomat in the world and the most powerful courtesan in history,’ writes Purnell. Admired and loathed during her lifetime she was ‘the subject of multiple blood feuds, four excoriating books and a litany of lawsuits’.

Purnell tells a gripping tale of Harriman (quite at odds with her reputation as a scheming gold-digger), a woman who left school with no qualifications but used her aristocratic lineage and good looks to connect with such powerbrokers as Nelson Mandela, Joe Biden and the Kennedys. ‘She took hundreds of lovers, but what excited her most was power’, writes Purnell. In America she was a fierce Democrat backing Clinton’s presidency (he made her the American ambassador to France). She found the prospect of Reagan as leader of the free world ‘terrifying’. What would she have made of Trump?

For vintage film fans the glorious and beautifully illustrated The Third Man: The Official Story of the Film by John Walsh (Titan £24.99) looks at one of the finest British films ever made. About to celebrate its 75th anniversary The Third Man (1949) is a brilliant thriller set in gloomy, black-market Vienna. It’s a superbly sinister evocation of the city at night: the wet cobbles, the chase in the sewers, the big wheel… and the famous quote: “in Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” (Only the cuckoo clock came from Germany.)

Orson Welles made his character, Harry Lime, one of the cinema’s greatest antiheroes. And the movie influenced an array of subsequent filmmakers from Kurosawa to Scorsese. The famous theme tune, played on the zither, still has the power to raise the hairs on the back of the neck. There’s a great cast apart from Welles. Joseph Cotton plays Lime’s buddy, out of his depth in a foreign city, and Alida Valli is particularly affecting as the woman lost to grief. ■

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