studies. Among his school contemporaries were Niels Christian Brøgger, who became an essayist and novelist, and Kaare Martin, a future Nazi politician. Journalistic and educational career Having made study trips to London and Paris in the mid-1930s, Hambro graduated with a cand.philol. degree in 1939. In the summer of that year, on 15 July, he married Wenche Rynning-Koren (born 1916). Upon the outbreak of war, he was employed at the Oslo Commerce School, where he lectured until 1943. Hambro spent the latter part of the war in Uppsala, Sweden, where he taught at the Norwegian College and chaired the local Norwegian Society (1943–1944). After the war he returned to Oslo, teaching at the Commerce School until 1946. He had lectured in French literature at the Norwegian Library College in two intervals, during and after the war: from 1940 to 1941 and from 1945 to 1946. For the rest of the decade he taught Norwegian at Sorbonne, France. He also worked as a correspondent for the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (1946–1948), Dagbladet (1946–1948), Verdens Gang (1948–1949) and Arbeiderbladet (1949–1951). From 1951 to 1952 he was a press worker for the Research Councils in Norway and for the Norwegian delegation to the United Nations. In that decade he mainly acted as cultural counsellor at the Norwegian embassy in London. Employed in 1952, he acted in that position for seven years, whereupon he returned to Oslo. He was assistant teacher in French at the University of Oslo from 1963 to 1965; in that position he bemoaned the insufficient command of his students in their own mother tongue, maintaining that the Norwegian language should be used more actively in foreign-language tuition. Literary career and death Hambro made his literary debut in 1958 with the non-fiction book Frankrike ("France"), and released his first novel two years later. The novel, entitled De frafalnes klubb ("The Club of the Estranged"), was lauded by contemporary critics, but failed to arouse much subsequent interest from scholars. Hambro's reputation as a novelist rests more on his trilogy about the fictional character Nico Dietmeyer, deemed a Bildungsroman by academics. That work, serialised in the 1960s, was Hambro's first major commercial success, and has been reviewed in detail both by contemporaneous commentators and modern literary scholars. After a few unsuccessful novels in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Hambro pivoted towards non-fiction, especially focusing on linguistics and politics, fields of interest that he