Category: politics
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Flashes of Doubt
Some say it was during the 1960s that the idea of ‘the generation gap’ entered into popular usage. It became a useful phrase that summed up the differing attitudes towards politics, behaviour, music, fashion and virtually everything else between the young and the old — with the ‘old’ including everyone over 30. Children born after…
Isabella Muir
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Whispers of Fortune
For many people across the world, 1961 offered hope and optimism. For others not so much. On 20 January that year, John Fitzgerald Kennedy became President of the United States. In Whispers of Fortune we learn how the words of his inaugural speech crossed the Atlantic to be heard by a young woman who was…
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Storms of Change
More than a decade after the end of the Second World War, Britain was still reeling from the loss of life, the devastation, and the underlying fear that such hard-earned peace might be short-lived. But then a new decade arrived, bringing with it a generation of youngsters who believed they could put the past behind…
Isabella Muir
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Waiting for Sunshine
On her third birthday Libby Frobisher met her father for the first time and in this extract we learn just how difficult it can be to look back on the past with a clear focus, especially when trying to remember the years when we were small and the world was large and confusing… …when it…
Isabella Muir
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Lost Property
‘What’s your definition of a secret?’ This opening line from Lost Property, the second novel in the Janie Juke crime mystery series, introduces a theme that runs throughout the book – a theme of secrets and lies. At the heart of the novel readers are introduced to the secret organisation that was said to have…
Isabella Muir
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More and more and more
I read a book a few weeks ago that has turned my head! As I dived into each chapter, I learned more and more frightening statistics that expose the reality of the so-called ‘energy transition’. More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (2024) is an eye-opening text that considers the…
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Cars, cars and more cars
In Flashes of Doubt – set in 1962 Britain – we get a glimpse of the thoughts of William Arnold as he remembers the warning his father had given him years earlier about the rise and rise of the motor car. The route William used to take each workday, from his cottage in Burton Street…
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The bottom billion
Global trade and globalisation are now so ingrained in our world that it would seem impossible to remove them, to return to a time when local produce was enjoyed entirely by local people. Of course, trading across borders is not a new concept. As far back as the nineteenth century, British whaling ships landed on…
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What is real?
In our own way, we all need something to believe in. Walter, one of my favourite fictional characters, looks to nature in his attempts to understand the world. We first meet Walter in The Forgotten Children, when Emily travels to the isle of Anglesey, and on a clifftop walk she encounters a gentle stranger… ‘Today…
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Finding a voice
Last week we asked, What if new isn’t always better? looking at some of the implications of the Paris Peace Conference and the changes imposed on nations by the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations. It comes as no surprise that peoples who had suddenly gained new ‘masters’ found themselves questioning their rights,…
Isabella Muir 