Clare Mulley is the award-winning author of two biographies:
- 'The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville, Britain's First Female Special Agent of the Second World War', and,
- 'The Woman Who Saved the Children: A Biography of Eglantyne Jebb, Founder of Save the Children'.
Krystyna Skarbek, aka Christine Granville, was the first, and the longest serving, female special agent working for Britain in the Second World War. A Polish countess and beauty queen, in 1939 Christine swapped the comfort and security of life as a diplomat's wife to make an extraordinary contribution to the Allied war effort in occupied Europe and beyond, where she often had a life expectancy of just a few months. Making love to the cream of Polish and British special agents while fighting the Nazi advance, she was perhaps one of the most loved as well as one of the most successful female agents of the war. For her enormous courage and achievements she was awarded to OBE, George Medal and Croix de Guerre. Only now can her amazing story, hidden in secret service files and the unpublished memoirs of her many friends and lovers, be told in full.
Eglantyne Jebb was the in some ways unlikely founder of Save the Children. Never a mother herself, Jebb was not fond of children whom she referred to as 'the little wretches', and yet after the First World War she found herself facing private censure and public arrest as she fought for the starving children of Austria and Germany. 'The Woman Who Saved the Children' won the Daily Mail Biographers' Club prize. In pleasingly unlikely agreement, then PM Gordon Brown also called it 'a truly brilliant book'. All royalties from the book go to the Save the Children.
In 2010 Clare contributed to the 'Arvon Book of Life Writing'. She is a seasoned public speaker and occasionally writes and blogs for various websites, and papers including History Today, The Express and The Church Times, perfect titles for a historically-minded, left-wing atheist.
For more info please visit www.claremulley.com
