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Looking for Trouble

Looking for Trouble 1

by Virginia Cowles
Hardback
Publication Date: 18/01/2022
5/5 Rating 1 Review

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This sensational 1941 memoir of life on the frontline of wartime Europe by a trailblazing female war reporter is a dazzling rediscovered classic, introduced by Christina Lamb.

'I suppose this is what people call seeing history in the making .'

Madrid in the Spanish Civil War Prague during the Munich crisis Berlin the day Germany invaded Poland Helsinki as the Russians attacked Moscow betrayed by the Nazis Paris as it fell to the Germans London on the first day of the Blitz Virginia Cowles has seen it all.

As a pioneering female correspondent, she reported from Europe from the 1930s into the Second World War, watching 'the lights in the death-chamber go out one by one' from the frontline - always in the right place at the right time.

Flinging off her heels under shellfire; meeting Hitler ('an inconspicuous little man') and the 'dapper' Mussolini; gossiping with Churchill by his goldfish pond or dancing in the bomb-blasted Ritz; reading The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism on a Soviet train or eating reindeer with guerrilla skiers...

Introduced by Christina Lamb, Cowles' incredible testimony will make you an eyewitness to the twentieth-century as you have never experienced it before.

ISBN:
9780571367542
9780571367542
Category:
Reportage & collected journalism
Format:
Hardback
Publication Date:
18-01-2022
Publisher:
Faber & Faber
Country of origin:
United Kingdom
Pages:
480
Dimensions (mm):
216x135x40mm
Weight:
0.66kg
Virginia Cowles

Virginia Cowles was born in Vermont in 1910. She gravitated to journalism in her youth to earn her living after the death of her mother, writing features for Hearst Newspapers.

She became a trailblazing war correspondent for the Sunday Times, reporting from Civil War Spain in 1937 before covering wartime Europe for the BBC and NBC. Cowles wrote up her testimony in Looking for Trouble, a bestseller on publication in 1941, and later reported from North Africa as special assistant to the American Ambassador in London.

In 1945, Cowles married Aidan Crawley, a British journalist who had been a fighter pilot and spent years in a German POW camp, later becoming a politician and filmmaker; they had three children. As well as writing a play with Martha Gellhorn, Cowles was also a historian and biographer, whose subjects included Winston Churchill and the Romanov, Rothschild, and Astor families. She was killed in an automobile accident in France in 1983.

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I am a slow reader. If I manage to read 50 pages of a book read in a day, I'm doing well. Twice while reading this book I ripped through 120 pages in an evening. I just couldn't stop.

American war correspondent Virginia Cowles was a kind of Zelig figure during the rise of fascism in Europe: she seems to have popped up everywhere. She covered the Spanish Civil War, the Nazi takeover of Czechoslovakia, life in the Soviet Union, the Winter War in Finland, the Fall of France, London during the Blitz, and in between managed to interview Churchill and Mussolini. She had many close calls, and was often in physical danger.

It's not just that Cowles writes with clarity and style - and no small degree of conviction. She is also able to capture the mood and mentality of the time in a way that a modern historian with no first-hand experience cannot. One might read Max Hastings or Antony Beevor for hard information, but for a searing sense of what it's like to be standing in the eye of history's hurricane, it's hard to beat Cowles reportage.

Her description of the fall of France - with its slow, rolling sense of calamity moving in tandem with escalating stages of public disbelief and horror - is unforgettable. And along the way there are many other fascinating vignettes: the ludicrous Potemkinising of the Soviet train that crosses the Romanian frontier; the sense of mass hysteria at a Nuremberg rally; the oppressive air of thought control that overhangs a Moscow bleached of all colour and life; the French monastery that was evacuated in total silence owing to the monks' vows ...

We've all heard of Martha Gellhorn, Marguerite Higgins, Clare Hollingworth - famous female war correspondents of that era. But as you read through this enthralling book, you keep wondering: How come I have never heard of Virginia Cowles?. So: the reprinting of this utterly absorbing memoir is truly welcome.

Recommended
Contains Spoilers No
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