Opening paragraphs...................

The world was going mad in the spring of 1939, or that's how it seemed to Joan Bright.  A jaunty twenty-nine-year-old with swept up hair and a button-down dress, she had travelled to London in search of secretarial work, having just turned down a job in Germany as governess to the children of Rudolf Hess, the Deputy Fuhrer of the Third Reich.

-Giles Milton:  Churchill's Ministry Of Ungentlemanly Warfare:  The Mavericks Who Plotted Hitler's Defeat