‘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.