Maisie Dobbs, by Jacqueline Winspear [2]

We meet Maisie Dobbs as she steps out of the Warren Street tube station, a woman in a navy blue jacket and skirt, with “a way of walking, with her shoulders back and head held high”. It is 1929, ten years after the end of the Great War, but London and all of England have not recovered, indeed perhaps have never entirely recovered. For the British Empire as whole “908,371 ‘soldiers’ [were] killed in action, died of wounds, died as prisoners of war and were missing in action from 4 August 1914...