The typewriter and the guillotine : an American journalist, a German serial killer, and Paris on the eve of WWII
"In 1925, the Indianapolis-born Janet Flanner took an assignment to write a regular 'Letter from Paris' for a lighthearted humour magazine called The New Yorker, started by some friends in New York. She'd come to Paris with dreams of writing about "Beauty with a Capital B." Her employer, self-consciously apolitical, sought only breezy reports on French art and culture. But as she woke to the frightening signs of rising extremism, economic turmoil...