The twelve-year-old Elizabeth ‘Betty’ Wiskemann was the perfect pupil at Notting Hill High School. In 1911, she picked up prizes for general progress, French, Latin recitation, chemistry and mathematics; she was a member of the drama and debating societies, and captain of netball and swimming. She capped her school career a few years later by winning a scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge. Wiskemann might have become one of those women depicted in the novels of Anita Brookner – clever academically, attracted to men but reluctant to subject themselves to the restrictions of marriage, wryly aware that they are unlikely to attract the formal recognition that less talented male colleagues take for granted.

Wiskemann was saved from this life by an ungenerous examiner, who refused to grant her a doctorate for her thesis on Napoleon III. After this, she continued to teach Cambridge undergraduates in term time for the steady income it provided, but worked as a journalist in Germany during the university vacations. She saw the last days of the Weimar Republic and the advent of Hitler. A sarcastic article about Nazism in the New Statesman earned her a brief period of detention by the Gestapo in 1936. After this, she avoided Germany but skirted around its frontiers. She reported from those countries – Czechoslovakia, Poland and Austria – that were threatened by Hitler. It was as though she had escaped from the Anita Brookner novel to become a character in an Eric Ambler story. Towards the end of her life, she remarked, in characteristically laconic fashion, on the consequences of failing her doctoral examination: ‘If I had remained an academic specializing in the nineteenth century, I suppose my life would have been considerably duller than it became.’

Geoffrey Field shows just how far from dull the life of Wiskemann turned out to be. She began her career during the golden age of English journalism. Great news stories were to be had in Berlin, Vienna and Rome – all places that were easy to reach from London. In