The lady with the limp

‘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.

It is perhaps unsurprising that war histories contain a high number of people with missing or prosthetic limbs. Many of those who served parted with their extremities during action, such as the would-be Hitler-assassin Claus von Stauffenberg (who lost one arm, one eye and many fingers), and the extraordinary Sir Adrian Canton de Wiart (who lost one leg, one eye, and tore off two of his own fingers when the surgeon wouldn’t amputate). Others, such as the Anglo-Polish special agent Andrew Kowerski-Kennedy and the American-born Hall, lost their limbs (a leg each) before the war, but never considered letting that impede them.