Clare Mulley

Christina Granville—the nom de guerre of Krystyna Skarbek, the daughter of a shiftless Polish count and his Jewish heiress wife—was one of the most storied and decorated members of the British Special Operations Executive (S.O.E.) during the Second World War. As an S.O.E. agent, she carried out a number of daring missions across Europe, most famously the rescue of two British agents in France mere hours before they were scheduled to be executed by the Gestapo. Christina's war was an adventurous one, but her post-war life was bleak: unable to return to her beloved Poland, penniless, discriminated against in the U.K. because of her nationality, ethnicity, and gender, and often it seems unable to get out of her own way. She was ultimately murdered, still only in her mid-40s, by an obsessed co-worker.

Christina's is an interesting life, but not one that I think Clare Mulley fully does justice. There's no getting around the relative lack of sources—Christina doesn't seem to have been given much to writing or to reflection, and many papers about her were accidentally or deliberately destroyed—but even taking that into account I didn't feel as if Mulley ever got a proper handle on her subject. The portrait she provides of Christina is out of focus and sometimes at odds with itself (we're often told she's an introverted loner but often encounter her at parties and celebrations, and she had multiple relationships), and the structure isn't as good as it could be. I'm glad that Christina's story has been told, though, and that Mulley made a diligent attempt to separate fact from myth (it's unlikely, for instance, that Ian Fleming had an affair with her and used her as the model for Vesper Lynd).… (meer)

In this parallel history of two German aviatrix, the notorious Hannah Reitsch and the less well-known Melitta von Stauffenberg, one essentially has a meditation on the limits of patriotism. While both started out wanting to build a new Germany after the Great War Reitsch believed until the end of her life in the Nazi dream of one land and one people, wherein those who did not belong to that people were edited out of the picture; this is not news. Stauffenberg is the more interesting case as she was the sister-in-law of Claus von Stauffenberg and so was associated with the July 20th Plot. Further, while Reitsch appears to have been the better natural pilot Stauffenberg was a full-fledged engineer working in the German aviation industry until the point where her taint of Jewish ancestry caught up with her; but not before she received the Iron Cross for her work. In the end, while Reitsch lived long enough to be reviled, Stauffenberg died in the waning days of the war trying to assure the survival of her husband. Mulley ends on the note that whatever else the lives of these women demonstrate they illustrate the short-sighted and stupid limitations of the Nazi worldview.… (meer)