Departures of note

Frances Stonor Saunders was a British writer, historian and journalist best known for her 1999 book The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (published in Britain as Who Paid the Piper?). The book documented how the CIA secretly financed European and American cultural institutions, magazines and artists during the Cold War to counter Soviet influence, drawing on declassified documents and interviews. She also wrote Hawkwood: Diabolical Englishman, a biography of the medieval mercenary John Hawkwood, and The Woman Who Shot Mussolini, about the Irish aristocrat Violet Gibson who attempted to assassinate Benito Mussolini. As a journalist she wrote for publications including The Guardian, The Independent and the London Review of Books, and she worked in television documentary production.