West Hampstead author Alan Philps, left, whose book has been endorsed by Sarah Jessica Parker, right [Randolph Quan/Shawn Miller, Library of Congress]

ONCE writers have finished a book, they face a new task – extracting endorsements from authors and celebrities to put on the cover. These endorsements come in the form of snappy front cover quotes – “Unputdownable” – or more effusive blurbs on the back page. I’m hopeless at twisting arms, so my book, The Red Hotel: The Untold Story of Stalin’s Disinformation War, came into the world naked, with no endorsements front or back.

As I worried that no one would pay attention to a book so lacking in puffery, a miracle was happening in America. Lesley Blume, a New York Times writer and prize-winning historian, praised it as “disturbingly prescient”. At last, a cover quote! Then the New York Times selected it as a must-read book for July. You could have knocked me down with a feather when I saw an endorsement from a totally unexpected source: Sarah Jessica Parker, star of Sex in the City and its rebooted sequel, And Just Like That, recommended it to her 9.2 million Instagram followers. And not as a worthy tome, but as a diverting holiday read.

SJP is a vocal lobbyist for public libraries and has her own publishing imprint, so her recommendations carry weight. In my mind – but certainly not in hers – SJP and me go back a long way. In 1998 when I was a war correspondent in Baghdad, I sheltered from the bombs and missiles in a basement with a French photographer. While the earth was shaking around us, we watched series one of Sex and the City on his computer to calm our nerves.

When the explosions died down, I ran back to the Al Rashid Hotel – where guests had to trample a mosaic of the elder President Bush to get into the lobby – and up to my room where I waited for the dawn. Suddenly there was a great whooshing sound and a cruise missile sped past my window and exploded further down the street. That was close, I thought. Why hadn’t I stayed safe in the shelter in the company of SJP?

In that moment of relief and confusion, I had a strong feeling that she was my guardian angel in Baghdad. Now I know the angel of Baghdad helps with book marketing too.

Thousands of SJP’s followers have seen my book cover flashing by on her Instagram feed, and the tone of conversations with buyers of my book has changed. Before SJP, the buyers were men of a certain age, and if there was a woman, and I asked who to write the dedication to, it was usually, “My dad – early Christmas present”. Now readers whose bedside tables are piled with contemporary novels are wondering if they should take a trip to the Red Hotel in the 1940s. I saw this anguished Twitter post: “I enjoy non-fiction but where Russia is concerned, with what appears to be a very complex history, I’m always worried I’ll be left scratching my head.”

Gold star to this woman for clocking the complexity of Russian history, but The Red Hotel doesn’t require a Google search on every page. It tells the story of the British and American journalists who went to Moscow in 1941 to cover the Eastern Front after Hitler’s invasion of the USSR had thrown Stalin and Churchill together as unlikely allies.

Uncle Joe did not want any foreign reporters snooping around the Red Army, and on arrival they found themselves corralled in the gilded cage of the Metropol Hotel, never seeing a shot fired in anger but supplied with enough vodka and caviar to keep them happy. With the Soviet press the only source of information, they relied on their female Soviet assistants, known as “secretary-translators”, for news, companionship and a lot more.

The American journalist Edgar Snow wrote in his diary: “Many correspondents do not leave the hotel for weeks in winter but rely on secretaries and newspapers. Secretary orders breakfast in the morning, arranges pillow under your head while you eat it, shops for cigarettes and vodka, translates, interprets, teaches you Russian and sometimes goes to bed with you.”

Everyone fantasises about what it would be like to be confined to a luxury hotel. The Metropol Hotel where the journalists slept, worked and partied in wartime is the setting for Amore Towles’s best-selling novel, A Gentleman in Moscow. In wartime Soviet citizens were forbidden to associate with westerners, but within the walls of the Metropol and under the eyes of the secret police, fraternisation was tolerated, even encouraged.

The original idea for the book was to reveal how the hard-bitten Anglo-American war correspondents outwitted the censors. They didn’t. With no one to interview or approach for a new angle on the story – in Stalin’s Russia alternative views were treachery – they relied on their translators to tell them what life outside the magical island of the Metropol was really like. These women exerted enormous influence on the visiting reporters.

Some, such as Valentina Scott, did what their secret police masters required. Under her influence, The Times correspondent Ralph Parker became a reliable conveyor of Kremlin propaganda. In stark contrast, the heroine of the book, Nadya Ulanovskaya, a former spy for Soviet military intelligence in Shanghai and New York, became a secret dissident during the war. She whispered the truth about Stalin’s Russia into the ears of reporters, at huge risk to herself.

Then there is Tanya Svetlova, whom I befriended when I was a young correspondent in the 1980s and who sparked in me an abiding interest in the story of the women of the Metropol. With her bourgeois background, Tanya was denied further education in the workers’ state, even the chance to go to drama school. The stage was her dream, but she wangled a job in the Metropol and settled for marriage to a British journalist and a new life in the West.

Along with these human stories, the reader can follow some of the most dramatic moments of Russian history. More topically, they can learn how Vladimir Putin thought he could turn the clock back and follow Stalin’s lead in controlling the narrative of his ill-conceived war on Ukraine. Putin, of course, is no Uncle Joe.

So my thanks to SJP, for broadening the appeal of my book, and for providing an example of the circularity of life, when people from one’s past reappear after many years in strikingly different roles.

• The Red Hotel: The Untold Story of Stalin’s Disinformation War. By Alan Philps, Headline, £22