On the front lines of the Second World War, a contingent of female journalists were bravely waging their own battle. Barred from combat zones and faced with entrenched prejudice and bureaucratic restrictions, these women were forced to fight for the right to work on equal terms as men.
Going with the Boys follows six remarkable women as their lives and careers intertwined: Martha Gellhorn, who out-scooped her husband Ernest Hemingway on D-Day by traveling to Normandy as a stowaway on a hospital ship; Lee Miller, who went from being a Vogue cover model to the magazine’s official war correspondent; Sigrid Schultz, who hid her Jewish identity and risked her life by reporting on the Nazi regime; Virginia Cowles, a 'society girl columnist' turned combat reporter; Clare Hollingworth, the first journalist to report the outbreak of war; and Helen Kirkpatrick, the first woman to report from an Allied war zone with equal privileges to men.
This intricately layered account captures both the adversity and the vibrancy of the women’s lives as they chased down sources and narrowly dodged gunfire, as they mixed with artists and politicians like Picasso, Cocteau, and Churchill, and conducted their own tumultuous love affairs. In her gripping, intimate, and nuanced portrait, Judith Mackrell celebrates these courageous reporters who risked their lives for a story and who changed the rules of war reporting for ever.
Commissioned in 1750, the Palazzo Venier was planned as a testimony to the power and wealth of a great Venetian family, but the fortunes of the Venier family waned and the project was left abandoned and unfinished. Yet in the early 20th century it attracted three fascinating women: Luisa Casati, Doris Castlerosse and Peggy Guggenheim. Luisa held parties as extravagant as Renaissance court operas. Doris hosted film stars and royalty at glittering gatherings. And for Peggy, the Palazzo served as a home for her exquisite collection of modern art.
Glamorised, mythologised and demonised - the women of the 1920s prefigured the 1960s in their determination to reinvent the way they lived. Flappers is in part a biography of that restless generation: it focuses on six women who between them exemplified the range and daring of that generation's spirit. Diana Cooper, Nancy Cunard, Tallulah Bankhead, Zelda Fitzgerald, Josephine Baker and Tamara de Lempicka were far from typical flappers. Talented, reckless and wilful, with personalities that transcended their class and background, they re-wrote their destinies in remarkable, entertaining and tragic ways. 'Flappers is all good, dirty fun... Mackrell is an engaging storyteller with a deceptively light touch' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
