Clare Mulley

The lady with the limp

Hall never asked for special dispensation, and even crossed the Pyrenees without telling her guide about her prosthetic leg

issue 30 March 2019

‘This seems to be in your rough area. I mean, it contains wooden legs and everything…’ my commissioning editor at The Spectator emailed. He was requesting a review of Sonia Purnell’s excellent A Woman of No Importance, a biography of the remarkable Virginia Hall, the only second world war agent to serve not only with Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) and its later American counterpart, the OSS, but eventually also with the CIA.

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