Martha Gellhorn

Six of her ten planets are cardinal, with two fixed and two mutable. Air takes four, earth three, water two and a single one fire. Mercury, Venus and Mars spread across twenty two degrees of Libra. The record says Gellhorn covered every major conflict for sixty years, stowed away in a hospital ship's lavatory to reach Normandy on D-Day, and was married to Hemingway, which she disliked being asked about.

This is a thin chart against a very large record, and the numbers say so plainly: exactly one contact comes inside a degree, and it is the Moon at an awkward angle to Venus at thirteen hundredths, what soothes a person and what attracts them disagreeing. That is a reading about private life, and the only part of her private life the record mentions is a marriage she disliked being asked about, which is not something a chart gets to comment on.

Six cardinal planets is the structural fact, and it is the one that meets the record. Cardinal is the mode that begins, and sixty years of arriving at wars is a career made entirely of beginnings, each one somewhere new. The record's middle fact is the clearest version of it: getting to Normandy by hiding in a lavatory is starting something without permission, and the chart describes an appetite for starting rather than any particular landing.

After the first degree the orbs run wide. The Sun sits in easy contact with Neptune at just over a degree, imagination available without cost, and sixty degrees from Uranus at over two degrees, independence without a fight: people who are unusual and untroubled by being unusual. That second one is the reading a reader will want for the stowaway, and two degrees is a wide orb to want it at. Her Moon's sign is certain at twenty one degrees of Taurus. Saturn, Neptune and Pluto were the three retrograde planets. She died in London on 15 February 1998, at eighty nine. Mercury stood square her natal Moon at thirteen hundredths of a degree that day, reaching the one tight pairing the chart has. The Moon was full and eighty six per cent lit, a phase that sees a thing clearly and usually through other people, which for a war correspondent is the job.