As a condition for granting interviews, Martha Gellhorn would insist that her husband’s name not be mentioned, stating that she had no intention of ‘being a footnote in someone else’s life.’ In 1936, they met in Key West, Florida. She had admired his fiction and he had adored her face. Her pains for difference, shying children, captured on the dust jacket of her celebrated novel, The Trouble I Have Seen. They married in wartime 1940 and divorced in 1945.

Perhaps she did not unpin her blonde hair and swing her leg from a bar stool at Sloppy Joe’s as he walked by, but, like John Huston’s Nora and Frank, marriage was a holed-up hotel ahead of a hurricane. Once the war passed, shutters opened to the sun, but—like the fourth and final-time pairing of Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart in Key Largo—Gellhorn, for all her effort, couldn’t disarm sexual politics, the ‘unfathomable weirdness of dealings between the sexes,’ and the confinement and dealings of ‘the kitchen of life’.

• https://radar.gsa.ac.uk/9495/