LAST CALL AT THE HOTEL IMPERIAL

Sub-titled 'The Reporters Who Took On A World At War', we meet an astonishing group - glamorous, gutsy and irreverent to the bone. As cub reporters in the 1920s, they roamed across a war-ravaged world, on mules with wooden saddles, sometimes gliding through countries in the splendour of a first-class sleeper car. While empires collapsed and fledgling democracies faltered, they chased deposed empresses, international financiers and Balkan gunrunners, then knocked back doubles late into the night. This mammoth work is the extraordinary story of John Gunther, H. R. Knickerbocker, Vincent Sheean and Dorothy Thompson, a close-knit band of wildly famous American reporters, who in the run-up to World War One took on dictators and rewrote the rules of modern journalism. They landed exclusive interviews with Hitler, Franco and Mussolini who sought to persuade them of fascism's inevitable triumph. Nehru and Gandhi also courted them, seeking American allies against British imperialism. Churchill, for his part, saw them as his best shot at convincing a reluctant America to join the war against Hitler. They grabbed front pages across the world, causing Goebbels to rage about 'international liars and counterfeiters'. In their private lives they were committed to the cause of freedom with all its hazards and argued about love, war, sex, death and everything in between and wrote it all down. These fault lines would run through their own marriages and friendships too. Told with the immediacy of a conversation overheard, this is a revelatory book about the interwar years and these two New Yorkers, one Chicagan, one Illinois and one Texan together with their outer circle including Marcel Fodor from Hungary, Emily (Mickey) Hahn reporting from Shanghai as of 1935, British diplomat Harold Nicolson reporting from Tehran, Eddy Sackville-West the music critic and Rebecca West among many others. With maps of their travels and a superb sense of how these first-rate correspondents had not just access, time and money, but real influence over world affairs. A monumental tome, 557pp, photos.