The Influencers

They were born the same year. Their families left Paris the same year. Their sons entered institutions that would shape their lives the same year. If Stephen Sondheim had written Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons instead of Charlotte Gray, he might have employed one of the timeless lines from his Broadway show Company to depict the lives and loves of Jennie Jerome Churchill and Sara Delano Roosevelt: “Parallel lines who meet.”

Gray’s dual biography is among a string of recent titles about women at the sides of the two great men who found themselves at the ­centre of the twentieth century’s most brutal and most consequential conflict. Like The Daughters of Yalta, Catherine Grace Katz’s portrait of Sarah Churchill, Anna Roosevelt, and Kathleen Harriman (the daughter of the American diplomat W. Averell Harriman), and The Churchill Sisters, Rachel Trethewey’s...