Looking for Trouble

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.

About the Author

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.