As the sun set behind Manhattan’s sprouting new skyscrapers on 10 May 1929, a young American journalist walked up the gangplank of a liner bound for England. He was Vincent Sheean, born just before Christmas in 1899, whose career clambered through the turmoil and bloodshed of the years between the Great War and the Cold War. Sheean had seen some of the birth pains of the Soviet Union, and in China was acquainted with Soong Ching-ling, wife of Sun Yat-sen, the man who led the revolution that overthrew the Qing dynasty in 1911.
Sheean had a talent for making connections. When his ship docked in Britain, he headed to London, where he was already a satellite in the literary and artistic circle orbiting the Bloomsbury home of Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell. Bloomsbury’s rundown Georgian terraces and squares were at the centre of Sheean’s London life. In his remarkable memoir Personal History, which loosely inspired Foreign Correspondent, Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1940 film, Sheean wrote that he “caroused in Gordon Square, worked in Gordon Square, was ill in Gordon Square and made love in Gordon Square”. As for Woolf and her friends, “they were intellectuals and I was not – nor did I want to be”. He spent weekends at Knole in Kent, the grand home of Virginia Woolf’s lover Vita Sackville-West.
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