The fast-paced, keen-eyed memoir of an American gossip columnist turned reporter as she reports from the frontlines of the Spanish Civil War and World War II
A pioneering journalist, Virginia Cowles was just thirty when she reported both sides of the Spanish Civil War, met Hitler ("an inconspicuous little man" who enjoyed mimicking Goebbels) and interviewed Mussolini, gossiped with Winston Churchill by his goldfish pond, and ate reindeer with guerilla fighters in Finland. Her reportage blends sharp political analysis with a gossip columnist's eye for the perfect, human detail-as well as her uncanny ability to be in the right room at the right time.
Cowles was also one of the few journalists to see that the rise of fascism in Europe was a threat to democracy everywhere. Her insights are as piercing and relevant to today's extremism as they were seventy years ago. Virginia Cowles, OBE was born in Vermont in 1910. She gravitated to journalism in her youth, beginning as a society reporter for Harper's Bazaar before pitching the idea of a travel column to Hearst Magazines, which she successfully transformed into a foreign press correspondent role when she began covering the Spanish Civil War in 1937. She later reported from North Africa as the special assistant to the American ambassador. Cowles died in France in 1983.
