What did it take to be a woman at the heart of the war effort?
Join us for an evening with award-winning biographers Clare Mulley and Sonia Purnell as they discuss their remarkable subjects with journalist and broadcaster Razia Iqbal.
Mulley's The Spy Who Loved tells the story of Krystyna Skarbek, a Polish-born Jewish woman, aka Christine Granville , Britain’s first female special agent and Churchill’s ‘favourite spy’.
Purnell's A Woman of No Importance is the untold story of Virginia Hall, the woman with a wooden leg who became the Gestapo’s most wanted Allied spy and masterminded a huge jailbreak of fellow agents from a French prison camp.
Clare Mulley’s latest book is The Women Who Flew for Hitler. Her first book, The Woman Who Saved the Children about Eglantyne Jebb, was republished in 2019 to mark the centenary of Save the Children.
Sonia Purnell’s books include First Lady: The Life and Wars of Clementine Churchill and Just Boris: A Tale of Blond Ambition. Her journalism has appeared in The Economist, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times.
Razia Iqbal is one of the main presenters of Newshour, the flagship current affairs programme on BBC World Service and she regularly presents The World Tonight on Radio 4. She has presented Talking Books on BBC World TV and Front Row on Radio 4. She was the BBC’s Arts Correspondent for more than a decade, and has worked as a political reporter and foreign correspondent in Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
