The Arabs and the West

Clare Hollingworth was born in Knighton, England on October 10, 1911. She attended the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London and afterward studied at the University of Zagreb. While working for the League of Nations Union in early 1939, she aided thousands of refugees from the Sudetenland, the region of Czechoslovakia that had been annexed by the Nazis, by arranging travel documents that would let them cross into Poland. She wrote about their plight for small publications in Britain.

After learning of her work in Poland, The Telegraph hired her as a correspondent on August 25, 1939. While driving alone on the road from Gleiwitz, Germany to Katowice, Poland, she discovered the valley where Germans were hiding troops, tanks, and field guns for a major military incursion. She telephoned her editor with the news, which was a world exclusive. She also reported on the start of the war itself. Besides World War II, she covered the Greek and Algerian civil wars, hostilities between Arabs and Jews in the waning days of the British mandate in Palestine, the Vietnam War, and China. Her other major scoops included a 1963 article for The Guardian in which she cautiously identified the British intelligence agent Kim Philby as a member of a ring of Soviet spies that included Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess and the 1968 article for The Telegraph in which she reported the United States' plans for peace talks with Vietnam. During her career, she contributed articles to The Telegraph, The Guardian, The International Herald Tribune, and The Wall Street Journal.

She wrote several books during her lifetime including The Three Weeks' War in Poland, There's a German Just Behind Me, The Arabs and the West, Mao and the Men Against Him, and her memoir Front Line. She received the Order of the British Empire in 1982. She died on January 10, 2017 at the age of 105.

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