Clare Mulley

AGENT Zo tells the incredible story of Second World War resistance fighter Elżbieta Zawacka, sometimes known as Elizabeth Watson but more often as ‘Zo’. The only woman to reach London as an emissary of the Polish Home Army command, Zo became the only female member of the Polish elite Special Forces, the ‘Silent Unseen’, who were trained in the British countryside. In 1943, she also became the only woman to parachute to Nazi-occupied Poland. There, while being hunted by the Gestapo, she took a key role in the largest organised act of defiance against Nazi Germany, the Warsaw Uprising. After the war, the Soviet-backed communist regime not only imprisoned Zo, but also ensured that her remarkable story remained hidden for over forty years. Now, through new archival research and exclusive interviews with people who knew and fought alongside her, Clare Mulley brings this forgotten heroine back to life.

The Women Who Flew for Hitler tells the story of Nazi Germany’s only female test pilots, one of whom tried to save Hitler, the other to kill him. Hanna Reitsch flew giant gliders, rocket planes and even a manned prototype cruise missile – the V1 flying bomb. A fanatical Nazi, in the last days of the war she tried to rescue Hitler from the bunker. Her nemesis, Melitta von Stauffenberg, engineer and test pilot for the Stuka dive bombers, had Jewish ancestry. In July 1944 she supported the famous bomb plot to kill Hitler… Not surprisingly, although they did not know all of each other’s secrets, the two women hated each other. Optioned for TV.

The Spy Who Loved brings to life Polish-born, part Jewish, Countess Krystyna Skarbek, aka Christine Granville, the first woman to serve Britain as a special agent in the Second World War. In 1941, the vital intelligence she smuggled across borders prompted Churchill to call her his ‘favourite spy’. But it was her service in occupied-France, in 1944, that make her legendary, including single-handedly securing the defection of a strategic German garrison, and saving the lives of many of her male colleagues. The Spy Who Loved, for which Clare was decorated with Poland’s national honour, the Bene Merito, has been optioned for film.

The Woman Who Saved the Children Eglantyne Jebb was arrested in Trafalgar Square for campaigning to help the starving children of Britain’s former enemies. In 1919, few in London were sympathetic. Yet within weeks the audacious Jebb had secured the first donation to her ‘Save the Children’ fund from the public prosecutor at her trial, and another from the British PM’s wife. Never fond of individual children, ‘the little wretches’ as she once famously called them, Jebb was an unconventional woman, driven by passion and compassion. The Woman Who Saved the Children won the Daily Mail Biographers Club Prize, and all author royalties are donated to Save the Children. Under option for film.

Saffron Walden’s astounding independent library, The Gibson Library, commissioned this colourful history of their remarkable, and sometimes scandalous, institution and collection. The oldest book is from 1350; there is a medieval chain book; a volume marginalised by Martin Luther in rather angry red ink; rare original tracts from the English Civil War; and, among much […]