The high point for both women came in the Thirties. Thompson was among the first to interview Hitler and then became a heroine when the Nazis deported her. With her tales of life in Berlin during the rise of Hitler, and later her campaigns on behalf of Jewish and other refugees, Thompson became a leading columnist, broadcaster and lecturer, commanding at the peak of her celebrity the astronomical fee of $7,000 a speech. She also helped Lewis to write It Can't Happen Here, his 1935 fantasy about an American dictator, which prefigured the mythology of McCarthyism.

Yet Thompson was jealous of West, who produced one book of enduring value alongside ephemeral fiction and journalism. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, which chronicled her travels in Yugoslavia and concluded with the German invasion in 1941, remains a classic, even if her admiration for the Balkans strikes us as naive in the light of the genocides that took place during and after the Second World War, not to mention that which followed the breakup of Yugoslavia. Her post-war works, The Meaning of Treason (about William Joyce and John Amery) and A Train of Powder (which tried to link the Nuremberg trials and the lynch-mobs in the southern states of America), were based on New Yorker articles and vitiated by what Susan Hertog rightly calls "moral cowardice". 

Neither Thompson nor West ever came to terms with the world after 1945. True, they continued to have outrageous adventures: while reporting on the trials of Nazi war criminals, West was secretly enjoying a passionate affair with one of the American judges, Francis Biddle. The two women had a high old time, too, at the Republican and Democratic conventions in 1948, though Cold War politics left them both cold.