Blog

The Original Hackers

Ruth listened in to conversations between the dispersed members of European royal families, a ‘rather bad-tempered’ Mme Chiang Kai-shek, and senior political and diplomatic staff including Churchill and Roosevelt, or Mr Smith and Mr White as they were known over the phone.

28 November 2013

Getting into the Olympic Spirit

‘I call upon the youth of the world!’ This was of course an exaggeration. Hitler was the Patron of the games and the Nazis had no wish to embrace young Jewish, Black African, Gypsy, Jehova Witness, gay, communist or disabled people…

24 September 2013

Found in Translation?

Would the ‘English sense of humour’ she displayed in her letters to British friends, be lost, and, looking back, what nuances had I failed to catch when translating the woman to the page in the first place…

21 September 2013

The Final Possession?

I know that my biography of Christine can never be definitive. No one ever possessed Christine… No self-respecting biographer could claim to capture her entirely; her spirit defies it.

21 August 2013

You’ve written the book – what next?

Once I was given a loaf of home-made bread by one fan of the book, another time when I was showing some slides of Christine and her fellow agents in the field when a voice piped up from the back of the room saying, ‘blimey, that’s my dad’…

7 June 2013

Save the Children blog

Finishing a book seems to be a series of false dawns, and writing the words ‘…and she died’ is of course just the start of it…

4 May 2009