A Noble Combat

The letters of Shiela Grant Duff and Adam von Trott zu Solz tell of a friendship - tender, strained, and in the end tragic - between a young Englishwoman who became a distinguished foreign correspondent in the mid-1930s, and a German Rhodes Scholar who eventually joined the resistance against Hitler and was executed by the Nazis. The correspondence spans the years when Sheila and Adam's friendship first blossomed, amid hopes for a new Europe and a world order of social justice and self-rule. The story continues to the eve of war, when their relationship finally floundered under the strain of their own temperaments and the mounting crisis in Europe.