Virginia Cowles

Harriet Virginia Spencer Cowles OBE (born August 24, 1910 in Brattleboro , † September 16, 1983 ; pseudonym: Nancy Swift ) was a British journalist and writer.

Life

Cowles came in 1910 as the daughter of Dr. Edward Spencer Cowles and his wife Florence Wolcott Cowles, nee Jacquith, were born.

Cowles began working as a journalist in the United States in the 1930s. After initially working for the gossip columns in Boston and New York newspapers - for which she mainly wrote on the subjects of fashion, love and society - she switched to foreign reporting. She covered the Spanish Civil War for the Daily Telegraph , the Sunday Times and the Hearst papers . She then covered the Winter War for the Sunday Times before returning to Great Britain. From 1942 to 1943 she worked for the American ambassador in London, John G. Winant . For the Sunday Times and the Chicago Sun they reported on the African campaign .

In 1945 she married Aidan Merivale Crawley , whose name she adopted. As a publicist, however, she continued to operate under her maiden name. In the following four decades, Cowles was able to post considerable commercial success with a long series of individual political biographies (such as Wilhelm II and Winston Churchill ) and family biographies (such as the Rothschilds and the Romanovs ). Critics often criticized the lack of sharpness and reliability of their historical analyzes, but in return often praised the accuracy of their eye for the human. From this point of view, so judged Der Spiegel in 1955, she was able, astonishingly, to understand not only the people she portrayed, but also the historical background against which they acted.

Cowles, who had been a member of the Order of the British Empire since 1947 , died in France in 1983 as a result of a traffic accident near Biarritz .

Works

• Winston Churchill. The man and his time , 1954.
• The cheerful king. The Sorrow and Joy of Edward VII , 1957. Original: Edward VII and His Circle , 1956.
• Wilhelm der Kaiser , 1967. Also as Wilhelm II , 1976 and Wilhelm II. The last German Kaiser , 1983; Original: The Kaiser , 1963.
• 1913. Farewell to an era , 1969.
• The Romanovs , 1971.
• The Rothschilds. 1763-1973. History of a family , Ploetz, Würzburg 1975, ISBN 3-87640-062-7 , in the original: The Rothschildts , 1974.
• The enemy in the back. Sabotage of the German Africa Corps by the SAS. Motorbuch-Verlag, Stuttgart 1986, ISBN 3-87943-630-4 .