Authors’ Club member Stephanie Williams’ The Education of Girls: Coming of age in 4 years that changed America 1966-1970 is published this month. This is the story of how the Vietnam war, racial strife and the birth of women’s liberation fundamentally changed women’s lives. Hillary Rodham Clinton says: ‘A rich and stirring history of a moment when everything was changing for women in higher education.’
Baron William de Ropp, a Baltic German aristocrat, wasn’t just any ordinary spy; he was MI6’s top secret agent in Nazi Germany from 1931 to 1939, managing to escape Berlin just before war broke out. This unsung hero had direct access to Adolf Hitler and an inside track on the Nazi regime. His reports, shrouded in secrecy, had the power to shape British policy toward Germany in a pivotal period of history. Club member Tim Willasey-Wilsey’s The Spy and the Devil journeys into the shadows of Nazi Germany, where a forgotten British spy worked tirelessly to avert catastrophe and discover the secrets that history almost left behind.
1950s London with its bomb sites, air raid shelters and attitudes to gender, race, class and sex is vividly present in Miranda Miller’s latest book, When I Was, a portrait of the writer as a young girl. The young Queen of England is being crowned on a television in the corner of the room. Three-year-old Viola gazes out at the party guests in this fancy London house, already alert to human drama. This genteel family has to move from a large house to a tiny flat. Viola’s Anglo-Indian mother hoped for more from life, while her father gets involved in ghosting the memoir of a chorus girl who married a millionaire.
Club member Suzi Feay is contributing editor to The Aftershock Review, a new poetry magazine that launched in Spring 2025. She interviewed its editor Max Wallis in The Guardian books pages in July. Since its launch the magazine has been awarded Arts Council funding and a TS Eliot Foundation grant and sold out the first pressing. As well as in Aftershock, Suzi’s poems have been published in Poetry Review, Poetry Scotland, The London Magazine and Magma.
Authors’ Club Chair Lucy Popescu has contributed to Women Who Dared: From the Infamous to the Forgotten, published by Edinburgh University Press in September 2025. Edited by Ben Fletcher-Watson and Jo Shaw, with a foreword by acclaimed Scottish writer Sara Sheridan, the collection brings together 45 essays from historians, writers and commentators. Spanning contents and centuries, Women Who Dared uncovers the lives of women who defied expectations and shaped history—from monarchs and revolutionaries to scientists and activists. Lucy wrote about the murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya in 2006.
As a boy, Alistair Wood lived within the walls of an MI6 training camp. His mother was one of a handful of women to have operated behind the lines in post-war Berlin. His father, once one of Britain’s most highly-regarded intelligence officers, was an absent and perplexing figure, the reasons for his sudden departure from the Service still classified to this day. Wood’s My Family and Other Spies spans pre-Second World War to the fall of Communism and is a son’s reckoning with the secrets of the past.
It’s the first anniversary of Chris Schuler’s substack, Notes in the Margin: https://cjschuler.substack.com/