A Noble Combat

One of the most eloquent and moving correspondences of the twentieth century the letters that passed between Shiela Grant Duff and Adam von Trott zu Solz tell of a friendship--tender strained and finally tragic--between a young Englishwoman who became a distinguished foreign correspondent in the 1930s and a German Rhodes Scholar who eventually joined the resistance against Hitler and was executed by the Nazis after the abortive coup of 1944. The letters begin at Oxford where Shiela and Adam moved in a circle of friends that shared fervent dreams of social justice and a new Europe. The story continues to the eve of war when their relationship shattered under the pressures of their own temperaments and the mounting European crisis. Graceful and evocative these letters paint an intimate portrait of a troubled generation of young cosmopolitan and politically committed intelligentsia in the 1930s and give us a lasting record of the social world and political tensions of the era before the Second World War.