Clare Mulley

Sidney Reilly, Ace of Spies, remains an enigma

18 January 2023 10:00 pm

‘James Bond is just a piece of nonsense I dreamt up,’ the former naval intelligence officer Ian Fleming once said.…

The sheer tedium of life at Colditz

17 September 2022 9:00 am

Given the prisoners’ histories, it’s not surprising there were so many attempted breakouts from Colditz, says Clare Mulley

The great betrayal of Ethel Rosenberg

19 June 2021 9:00 am

Ethel Rosenberg was an exceptional woman. Born with a painful curvature of the spine to a poor family of Jewish…

The defiance of the ‘ghetto girls’ who resisted the Nazis

5 June 2021 9:00 am

‘Jewish Resistance in Poland: Women Trample Nazi Soldiers,’ ran a New York headline in late 1942. That autumn, the Nazi…

Out-scooping the men: six women reporters of the second world war

22 May 2021 9:00 am

Two war correspondents were hitching a lift towards Paris in August 1944 when a sudden wave of German bombers forced…

Sleeping with the enemy: the wartime story of ‘La Chatte’

10 April 2021 9:00 am

The name ‘Carré’ immediately evokes the shadowy world of espionage. Ironically, however, few people today have heard of the real…

Monuments to the second world war are looking increasingly dodgy

4 July 2020 9:00 am

Most monuments are literally set in stone — or cast in bronze to better survive the weather. Being enduring, they…

Female partisans played a vital role in fighting fascism in Italy — but it was a thankless task

14 December 2019 9:00 am

‘I am a woman,’ Ada Gobetti wrote in a clandestine Piedmont newsletter in 1943: An insignificant little woman, who has…

How Britain conned the US into entering the war

7 September 2019 9:00 am

In June 1940, MI6’s new man, Bill Stephenson, ‘a figure of restless energy… wedged into the shell of a more…

By September 1942, Hall was being hunted as one of the Allies’ ‘most dangerous’ agents

The Lady with the Limp: homage to the one-legged Virginia Hall, SOE’s ‘most dangerous’ agent

30 March 2019 9:00 am

‘This seems to be in your rough area. I mean, it contains wooden legs and everything…’ my commissioning editor at…

Anita Leslie, aged 23 in 1937 © Tarka Leslie-King

Anita Leslie: sparkling socialite with the Croix de Guerre

18 August 2018 9:00 am

Anita Leslie knew how to tell a story. Arranging to sit for a portrait six months before she died, she…

The CIA, the Vietnam deserters and the aptly named Operation Chaos

10 March 2018 9:00 am

‘Keep my name out of it’, was the fairly standard reply when Matthew Sweet started researching the story of the…

Paris-born Pearl Witherington led a force of over 1,500 maquisards in the summer of 1944

Carve their names with pride

11 March 2017 9:00 am

‘Women,’ Captain Selwyn Jepson, SOE’s senior recruiting officer, once wrote, ‘have a far greater capacity for cool and lonely courage…

Paris-born Pearl Witherington led a force of over 1,500 maquisards in the summer of 1944

Carve their names with pride

9 March 2017 3:00 pm

‘Women,’ Captain Selwyn Jepson, SOE’s senior recruiting officer, once wrote, ‘have a far greater capacity for cool and lonely courage…

Licence to kill

14 January 2017 9:00 am

As I read the last chapter of this book, news broke that the Russian ambassador to Ankara, Andrey Karlov, had…

What did you do in the last war, Maman?

2 July 2016 9:00 am

‘La France,’ as everyone knows, is female. Perhaps this is due to gendered assumptions about the beauty, cuisine and couture…

The house that Alfred built

19 September 2015 9:00 am

This is a book about boundaries — and relationships. At its heart is the eponymous house by the lake, which…

Mission near impossible

18 July 2015 9:00 am

Operation Thunderbolt was, Saul David contends in this gripping book, ‘the most audacious special forces operation in history’. In June…

Out of the woods: American forces attack a German machine gun post, December 1944. The grim determination of the Allies, whose heroism kept the Germans at bay, helped pave the way for the final Russian advance on Berlin

The beginning of the end

16 May 2015 9:00 am

Both German and Allied troops could be accused of war crimes in the struggle for the Ardennes. It’s a tragic and gruesome history, involving heavy casualties — but flashes of black humour make it bearable, says Clare Mulley

Moura Budberg with two of her lovers, H.G. Wells and Maxim Gorky

A passion for men and intrigue

9 May 2015 9:00 am

Moura Budberg (1892–1974) had an extraordinary life. She was born in the Poltava region of Ukraine, and as a young…

Appalling retributions and atrocities marked the end of the Free Republic of the Vercors. A French Resistance fighter is hanged in 1944

Resistance and reprisal

7 June 2014 9:00 am

Published to mark the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Vercors, perhaps the most famous stand of the French Resistance…

Pearl Witherington

She Landed by Moonlight, by Carole Seymour-Jones - review

13 July 2013 9:00 am

The subtitle of Carole Seymour-Jones’s quietly moving biography of the brilliant SOE agent Pearl Witherington is ‘the real Charlotte Gray’.…