In 1936, Hilde Spiel (1911-1990), later to be known as the ‘grande dame of Austrian literature’, left Vienna to start a new life in London. Ten years later she returned to her native city in British army uniform as a correspondent for the New Statesman. She recorded her thoughts and impressions in a journal, which she later reworked and expanded. It was published in Germany in 1968, and in 2011, Hilde Spiel’s centenary year, Ariadne Press have published a new English version prepared by her daughter, Christine Shuttleworth. It is both an important historical document and a personal account of a much-loved city ravaged and transformed by war, of its intellectuals, politicians and everyday people, seen by the sensitive eye of a woman caught between two worlds, neither of which any longer seemed entirely hers.