Last Call at the Hotel Imperial

The Reporters Who Took on a World at War

By: Deborah Cohen

Narrated by: Suzanne Toren

Read this prize-winning historian’s “immersive” ( New York Times) account of the famous writers who, in the run-up to World War II, took on dictators and rewrote the rules of modern journalism

They were an astonishing group: glamorous, gutsy, and irreverent to the bone. As cub reporters in the 1920s, they roamed across a war-ravaged world, sometimes perched atop mules on wooden saddles, sometimes gliding through countries in the splendour of a first-class sleeper car. While empires collapsed and fledgling democracies faltered, they chased deposed empresses, international financiers and Balkan gunrunners, then knocked back doubles late into the night.

Last Call at the Hotel Imperial is the extraordinary story of John Gunther, H.R. Knickerbocker, Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson: a close-knit band of wildly famous American reporters who, in the run-up to World War II, took on dictators and rewrote the rules of modern journalism.

In those tumultuous years, they landed exclusive interviews with Hitler, Franco and Mussolini who sought to persuade them of fascism’s inevitable triumph. Nehru and Gandhi also courted them, seeking American allies against British imperialism. Churchill saw them as his best shot at convincing a reluctant America to join the war against Hitler.

They committed themselves to the cause of freedom: fiercely and with all its hazards. They argued about love, war, sex, death and everything in between, and they wrote it all down. The fault lines that ran through a crumbling world, they would find, ran through their own marriages and friendships, too.

Told with the immediacy of a conversation overheard, this revelatory book captures how the global upheavals of the twentieth century felt to live through up close.

©2022 Deborah Cohen (P)2022 HarperCollins Publishers Limited

Critic reviews

"In her wildly ambitious new book, Deborah Cohen spins a kaleidoscopic epic out of the oft-told story of the rise of Fascism in Europe and the fall of empires in Asia. Drawing on the letters and diaries of a tight-knit troupe of American foreign correspondents, nearly all of them celebrities in their time, Last Call at the Hotel Imperial provides a timely and often uncanny mirror for our present moment of national reckoning." (Deborah Baker, author of In Extremis and A Blue Hand)

"The rise of Fascism, the spread of Communism, the Second World War, and the end of European empires: Last Call at the Hotel Imperial delivers a fresh, fast-paced history of the 20th-century’s most defining events through the eyes of the foreign correspondents who dashed off to cover them. It is also a captivating group biography of five unforgettable figures, whose tumultuous romances, ambitions, achievements and bereavements Deborah Cohen animates with extraordinary candor and compassion. Written with a style, insight and attention to detail its subjects would have envied, Last Call is a riveting narrative that unites public and private affairs with rare fluency and power." (Maya Jasanoff, author of The Dawn Watch)

"The celebrated journalists of the lost generation were voracious, reckless, promiscuous, funny and drunk, and they were also shrewd and deeply political. They explained the world to Americans, shaping their thoughts on fascism and empire, racism and sex.... As intimate and gripping as a novel, I read it all at once; I couldn't stop - this brilliant book vividly conveys what it felt like to live through the shocking crises of the thirties and forties as they were happening, when nearly anything could happen next." (Larissa MacFarquhar, authors of Strangers Drowning)