Description

‘Effervescent’ New Yorker Best Books Of 2022 So Far
‘Bursts with colour and incident’ FT Best Books of Summer

Read this prize-winning historian’s “immersive” ( New York Times) account of the famous writers who, in the run-up to World War II, took on dictators and rewrote the rules of modern journalism

They were an astonishing group: glamorous, gutsy, and irreverent to the bone. As cub reporters in the 1920s, they roamed across a war-ravaged world, sometimes perched atop mules on 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.

Last Call at the Hotel Imperial 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 II, took on dictators and rewrote the rules of modern journalism.

In those tumultuous years, 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 saw them as his best shot at convincing a reluctant America to join the war against Hitler.

They committed themselves to the cause of freedom: fiercely and with all its hazards. They argued about love, war, sex, death and everything in between, and they wrote it all down. The fault lines that ran through a crumbling world, they would find, ran through their own marriages and friendships, too.

Told with the immediacy of a conversation overheard, this revelatory book captures how the global upheavals of the twentieth century felt to live through up close.

Publisher Review

'A fresh, fast-paced history of the twentieth-century's most defining events through the eyes of the foreign correspondents who dashed off to cover them ... A riveting narrative that unites public and private affairs with rare fluency and power' Maya Jasanoff, author of The Dawn Watch 'Beautifully written ... A fascinating reminder of the days when first rate correspondents had not just access, time and money but real influence over world affairs' Caroline Moorehead, author of Village of Secrets, A Train in Winter and Martha Gellhorn: A Life 'Brilliantly conceived, beautifully written, this is a daring new history ... revelatory ... The work of a truly original historian. Unforgettable' Adam Tooze, author of Shutdown 'The celebrated journalists of the lost generation were voracious, reckless, promiscuous, funny, and drunk, and they were also shrewd and deeply political ... As intimate and gripping as a novel - I read it all at once, I couldn't stop' Larissa MacFarquhar, authors of Strangers Drowning 'In her wildly ambitious new book, Deborah Cohen spins a kaleidoscopic epic out of the oft-told story of the rise of fascism in Europe and the fall of empires in Asia ... A timely and often uncanny mirror for our present moment of national reckoning' Deborah Baker, author of In Extremis and A Blue Hand 'It is both bracing and oddly comforting to read Deborah Cohen's luminous account of a group of writers who faced their own challenging times with courage, wit, and portable typewriters ... Brilliant' Susan Pedersen, author of The Guardians 'A shrewd and vivid work of history, one that combines deep research with lustrous narrative verve' Fredrik Logevall, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Embers of War and JFK