Episode 77: The Great Escape of WWI
Guest: Margalit Fox, author of The Confidence Men: How Two Prisons of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History.
Sunday, October 3, 2021
The true story of two British POWs in WWI who hatched an elaborate escape plot that hinged on a Ouija Board, a feigned suicide attempt, and remarkable perseverance.Host historians Chris Anderson and Rick Beyer welcome Margalit Fox, author of “The Confidence Men: How Two Prisons of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History.” Captured after a horrific siege near Baghdad, imprisoned by the Ottoman Empire, these two British soldiers pulled off a an ingenious escape fromtheir remote mountaintop prison in Turkey – with the unintentional help of their captors!
Margalit Fox originally trained as a cellist and a linguist before pursuing journalism. As a senior writer in The New York Times’s celebrated Obituary News Department, she wrote the front-page public sendoffs of some of the leading cultural figures of our age. Winner of the William Saroyan Prize for Literature and author of three previous books, Conan Doyle for the Defense, The Riddle of the Labyrinth, and Talking Hands, Fox lives in Manhattan with her husband, the writer and critic George Robinson.
