First published in June 1941, Looking for Trouble is the tour de force testimony of an American debutante who became a roving war correspondent noted for her bravery and perceptiveness. 'Virginia Cowles went looking for trouble, and did she find it... While covering the Spanish Civil War, she had only to arrive in Valencia for the first bombs to fall there... Attending the 1938 party congress in Nuremberg, she was terrified by the frenzy of adulation for Hitler.' Daily Mail 'She was in Berlin the day Germany launched its attack on Poland, in Helsinki as the Russians invaded Finland, and she reached Paris when the Germans were just 17 miles from the city... It was war reporting of a long gone era, when journalists were not embedded but ranged freely... Looking for Trouble is a reminder of how excellent a reporter [Cowles] was.' Caroline Moorhead, Spectator

Virginia Cowles was born in Vermont in 1910. She gravitated to journalism in her youth to earn her living after the death of her mother, writing features for Hearst Newspapers. She became a trailblazing war correspondent for the Sunday Times, reporting from Civil War Spain in 1937 before covering wartime Europe for the BBC and NBC. Cowles wrote up her testimony in Looking for Trouble, a bestseller on publication in 1941, and later reported from North Africa as special assistant to the American Ambassador in London. In 1945, Cowles married Aidan Crawley, a British journalist who had been a fighter pilot and spent years in a German POW camp, later becoming a politician and filmmaker; they had three children. As well as writing a play with Martha Gellhorn, Cowles was also a historian and biographer, whose subjects included Winston Churchill and the Romanov, Rothschild, and Astor families. She was killed in an automobile accident in France in 1983.