Roderick Bailey
Femme Fatale
The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville, Britain’s First Female Special Agent of the Second World War
By Clare Mulley
Macmillan 426pp £18.99 order from our bookshop
In 1952, British newspapers reported the murder in a South Kensington hotel of a Polish-born woman called Christine Granville. Stabbed to death by a besotted ex-lover by the name of Dennis Muldowney, she had met him the previous year when both were working as cruise ship stewards. Before that she had been a waitress in a Polish café on the Brompton Road. And before that she had been one of the most remarkable secret agents of the Second World War, working covertly in two occupied countries and receiving an OBE, a George Medal and a French Croix de Guerre.
‘Christine Granville’ was a name she had chosen during the war. Born Maria Krystyna Janina Skarbek in 1908 into a noble Polish family and to a Jewish mother, she had joined British Intelligence in 1939, having fled to London when Germany invaded Poland. Her first mission saw her return to
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
'Any story about Eden has to be a story about the Fall; unchanging serenity does not make a narrative.'
@suzifeay reviews Jim Crace's 'eden'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/trouble-in-paradise
The first holiday camps had an 'ethos of muscular health as a marker of social respectability, and were alcohol-free. How different from our modern Costa Brava – not to mention the innumerable other coasts around the world now changed forever'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/from-mont-blanc-to-magaluf
'The authorities are able to detain individuals in solitary confinement for up to six months at a secret location', which 'increases the risk to the prisoner of torture'.
@lucyjpop looks at two cases of China's brutal crackdown on free expression.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/xu-zhiyong-thupten-lodoe