Caroline Moorehead
Buckmaster’s Girls
She Landed by Moonlight: The Story of Secret Agent Pearl Witherington
By Carole Seymour-Jones
Hodder & Stoughton 421pp £20 order from our bookshop
The Secret Ministry of Ag. & Fish: My Life in Churchill’s School for Spies
By Noreen Riols
Macmillan 304pp £20 order from our bookshop
‘This student, though a woman,’ wrote an officer assessing Pearl Witherington’s application to join the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in 1943, ‘possesses a strong and rather dominating personality. Very capable, completely brave.’ She needed all the toughness she could muster. Women were not generally regarded as suitable by SOE’s largely Oxbridge recruiters, whose view of the female sex remained mired in Victorian niceties. What was more remarkable than her eventual appointment as agent was the fact that she survived: of the 39 women who infiltrated France between 1941 and 1944, 13 did not return.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Unlike much that was extracted from India, these paintings were not plunder, and those who created them were properly remunerated and often received due credit.'
@PParkerWriting on 'Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/artists-for-hire
‘"I feel", Lowell told Hardwick ... "as if I were pulled apart and thinning into mist, or rather being torn apart and still preferring that state to making a decision."'
Richard Davenport-Hines on the letters of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/yours-unfaithfully-2
'To me, Elmore Leonard is as comforting in extremity as Pym, and as safe, in the last resort, as Wodehouse. The guys with the best lines are going to come out the other side; the dumb fucks are going to get it in the head or chest.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-spoonful-of-elmore