'Memoirs of such richness are rare . . . a joy' JAMES NAUGHTIE

'A remarkable personal journey, by one of the great political correspondents of our world - eloquent, enlightening, exhilarating' PHILIPPE SANDS

A trailblazer for women in journalism, Hella Pick arrived in Britain in 1939 as a child refugee from Austria. Over nearly four decades she covered the volatile global scene, first in West Africa, followed by America and long periods in Europe. In her thirty-five years with the Guardian she reported on the end of Empire in West Africa, the assassination of President Kennedy, Martin Luther King's march from Selma to Montgomery, the Vietnam peace negotiation in Paris, the 1968 student revolt in France, the birth of the Solidarity movement in Poland, and the closing stages of the Cold War. A request for coffee on board a Soviet ship anchored in Malta led to a chat with Mikhail Gorbachev. A request for an interview with Willy Brandt led to a personal friendship that enabled her to come to terms with Germany's Nazi past.

Her book is also a clarion call for preserving professionalism in journalism at a time when social media muddy the waters between fact and fiction, and between reporting and commentary.

INVISIBLE WALLS tells the dramatic story of how a Kindertransport survivor won the trust and sometimes the friendship of world leaders, and with them a wide range of remarkable men and women. It speaks frankly of personal heartache and of a struggle over her Jewish identity. It is also the intensely touching story of how, despite a gift for friendship and international recognised achievements as a woman journalist, a continuing sense of personal insecurity has confronted her with a series of invisible walls.

Pick was the doyenne of the diplomatic press corps and her legend preceded her... Invisible Walls is a book of great power and honesty, packed with vivid detail of her reporting adventures from the newly independent African states of the late 1950s, through the US of the turbulent 60s and on, through the cold war and into this uncertain age of populist promise-makers, all told with a keen intelligence and relentless dedication to the facts... She brought to the job the intellectual hunger and moral purpose of one who had escaped the great catastrophe that descended on Europe in the 1930s... I commend her book to the widest audience possible but particularly those setting out in journalism. Pick is testament to the necessity of having a broad intellectual hinterland and an open mind, the value of cultivating sources and finding things out. There is no better manifesto against the current clickbait culture and narcissistic social media obsession. This voice from before the age of Facebook and Twitter is profound and urgent