Personal History

Entertaining reading, this 'personal history' of a journalist who has specialized, sometimes against his will, in exotic and hairbreadth adventures in news getting. Spain on the verge of revolution, the Riff country in the throes of their fight for independence, China in revolution, Russia under the Soviets, Italy at the beginning of the Black Shirt advance, Persia when there was promise of troubled waters -- always he was shipped off to the scene of action with the demand for personal adventure and local color, rather than political and military information, kept before his eyes. There is something of the frankness of Lockhart in British Agent -- though one does not get so honest a picture of the man himself -- and the book might have decided appeal to the same market. This book formed the basis for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 movie, Foreign Correspondent.