27
with the job of extracting vital naval intelligence from an important mili-
tary prisoner, nor would she have obtained his temporary release from
imprisonment to stroll with her on the beach while she questioned him.
Cf. Geniesse, Passionate Nomad, 254.
- Imam Yahya (Yahya Muhammad Hamid ed-Din) (1869–1948).
- Cornwallis to Stark, 14 November 1939, Container 12.2 (Sir Kinahan
Cornwallis), Series II Correspondence, 1893–1985, HRC.
- Quoted without archival source or date by Raghid El-Solh, Britain’s Two
Wars with Iraq: 1941, 1991 (Reading: Ithaca Press, 1996), 107.
- For more about Thornhill’s work in Cairo, see CAB 102/610, TNA;
Sykes’ SOE P/F is at HS 9/1433/9, TNA.
- Interestingly, Clive’s SIS boss, Brian Giffey, was billeted with Stewart
Perowne. See Tina Tamman, Portrait of a Secret Agent Who Knew Kim
Philby (York: Thousand Eyes, 2014), chapter 8. It is conceivable that SIS
found Stark and Perowne, both former members of Section D, to be suit-
able landlords for SIS personnel because they still had some kind of con-
nection with SIS.
- The Countess of Ranfurly’s memoir is Hermione Ranfurly, To War with
Whitaker: The Wartime Diaries of the Countess of Ranfurly, 1939–1945
(London: Mandarin, 1995). Her friend Pamela Hore-Ruthven’s memoir is
Pamela Cooper, A Cloud of Forgetting (London: Quartet, 1993). Margaret
Stefana ‘Peggy’ Drower wrote no memoirs, but is renowned for her biog-
raphy: Flinders Petrie: A Life in Archaeology (London: Gollancz, 1985).
Many of the personalities in Freya Stark’s set are mentioned in Artemis
Cooper, Cairo in the War: 1939–1945 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1989),
93–100; 259–60.
- Of all the many friends Stark had in Iraq during the war, it is striking that
she selected only the ambassador, Ken Cornwallis, and Adrian Bishop for
special mention in the foreword of Dust in the Lion’s Paw, writing that they
‘went deeply into my life and my world is the poorer for their absence.’
- Nevertheless, Bishop was the subject of a novel set in Vienna and published
shortly before the war: Arthur Pumphrey [Alan Pryce-Jones], Pink Danube
(London: Martin Secker, 1939).
- Besides his possessing a deep knowledge of classical Latin and Greek
(which he read at Cambridge), and ancient and modern Farsi (acquired
while with APOC), no one seems able to explain how Bishop acquired
total fluency in such modern languages as Arabic, French, Italian, Greek,
and German (which he spoke perfectly with a Viennese accent). It suggests
an undefined, undocumented nomadic existence that lasted for some ten
years between 1925 and 1935.
- Devonshire Regiment, 1917–1920, including service with
DUNSTERFORCE.
PROLOGUE: OF SPIES, SCOUTS, AND COVER
