Eschewing Plutarch and Shakespeare's tale of Mark Antony's fatal romance, Naomi Mitchison's 'Cleopatra's People' starts with the next generation, with the children of the Queen and of Charmian, one of her 'mates'. The impact of Cleopatra's life and personality is reflected through them, and their efforts to follow in her wake.

Ancient Greek history and politics fascinated Naomi Mitchison, and in particular the long antagonism or rivalry of Athens and Sparta. In this, her second novel, she investigates the two city states through Alxenor, a young man from the tiny island of Poieessa, which changes hands along with the balance of power.

The Delicate Fire illustrates a fundamental change in Naomi Mitchison's work. The early stories are set in ancient Greece, like many before them. But here Mitchison effectively says farewell to that setting with accounts of the worlds of Sappho and 'Lovely Mantinea'. By the end, she seems wholly turned to the twentieth century - a new departure for her - tackling subjects such as the General Strike of 1926 and contemporaneous Hunger marches, and battles against censorship. This shift marks her politicisation, her growing fear of fascism, but more personally also the end of her long affair...

This is Naomi Mitchison's least successful novel, and new readers should not start here It is shaped by her own life and fears in her own experience in 1931, and is the first of her novels and stories not to have a historical setting. Mitchison was appalled by the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy, and wanted to warn the world. She was rather dismayed by the results of the Russian Revolution, of which she had once had great hopes. She also poured all her most personal feelings into the novel, and covered a plethora of subjects - not only free love, abortion and rape, but the unmentionable...

"The Bull Calves" was researched and written during the Second World War. This is very surprising, as Naomi Mitchison was tremendously busy at her home in Carradale, Kintyre, keeping open house for evacuees and refugees, running the farm and driving the tractor, organising the local Labour Party, and writing and producing for the dramatic society - and so on. She also wrote a diary for Mass Observation, of more than a million words. But she had to take her time with the novel and plan it more carefully than she usually had time for. She wanted to give Scotland and the world a message, of the...

This collection, which Naomi Mitchison published in 1957, is recognisably a 'Carradale book', containing as it does vivid and realistic stories and poems of the landscape and the people. Mitchison had moved to the village in Kintyre, on the west coast of Scotland, some twenty years before and was still much involved in its affairs, supporting the fishing fleet and running her own small farm. Yet, as Moira Burgess suggests in her Introduction to this new edition, these thirteen stories and fourteen interspersed short poems and songs do not make a straightforward, celebratory, collection. The...

Early in Orcadia was first published in 1987, and consists of five stories, set hundreds of years apart in time and dealing with different characters, but connected by their location in a particular corner of Orkney during the period known as the Stone Age. Mitchison links them formally by interpolating passages of fact and explanation between the fictional episodes, and by speculating in her own voice about what happened in prehistory, as far as it can be known from archaeological research, and how it fits in with the world of today. The slightly awkward jumps from one story to the next...

'We story-tellers have a delightful time playing with history, perhaps finding something fascinating, perhaps making dreadful mistakes.' Here, in The Oath-Takers, the 'central maypole round which the people ... must swing and fall' is Charlemagne, and one of 'the people' a young man who makes his journey to manhood in a world of feudalism and a powerful Church. In the second short novel, Sea-Green Ribbons, the reader enters the political, religious and social tumult of the English Civil War through the story and choices of a young woman, Sarah, from a radical Leveller family in London.

In 1957, Naomi Mitchison enjoyed two months 'of observation and thought' as she travelled in parts of postcolonial West Africa. She was the guest of friends new and old and, in Ghana, stayed at the Press Hotel, in her then role as a correspondent with The Manchester Guardian. Her reflections are presented in chapters - on social bars and classes, language, words, history, religion, morals, education, politics, clothes, art and music - as she pulls together her view of the ways in which 'Other People's Worlds', at different stages of development, impact on one another. 'Perhaps', she...

Naomi Mitchison's account of the life and work of the Afrikaner lawyer and political activist Bram Fischer (1908-1975) was first published in 1973, two years before his death. She writes from the perspective of her own experience - gained during regular visits and a commitment to Southern Africa, particularly Botswana, from the 1960s onwards - to present the key elements and actors in the story of the country and the peoples of South Africa. Above all, of Bram Fischer, who gave up a life of privilege to oppose, professionally and underground, the Government's 'monstrous policy' of apartheid.