My last couple of offerings have been rather sombre, so as it’s Christmas I thought it would be good to lighten the mood with something more optimistic. For the last few weeks, I have had the privilege of spending time with The Red Dress . Now, this is not a book and so represents a deviation from my usual subject matter, but I would argue that The Red Dress is still a text. Indeed, it represents one of the most extraordinary collections of stories that I have ever encounter

Last time I thought about the way Margaret Storm Jameson represents Armistice Day in her novel Company Parade (1934). This has led me on to think a bit more about Jameson’s other political fiction of the 1930s, and specifically In The Second Year (1936). Apparently, she considered this to be her best work. The novel is set five years ahead of the time of writing, but this 1941 is a distinctly dystopian future in which the British fascists, the National State Party, have com

It is Remembrance Day again. The opening section of my new novel, Where No Shadow Awaits, is situated in the Belgian city of Ypres for the 70 th anniversary of the Armistice, 11 th November 1988. Here, my journalist protagonist Helen Parkes, meets a mysterious old soldier and the adventure begins. Helen is about remembrance. Even as she begins to investigate the past, the decades between her and the stories she must tell loom large. But writers were grappling with the compl