Izzy says that the original Iseult would have been horrified at the thought of being the subject of a historical novel. Do you agree?

To some degree. Iseult Gonne was a very private person, who shunned attention, partly because of the complications around her illegitimacy, partly from seeing the trouble that attention-seeking brought to her mother, Maud Gonne. I can’t imagine that my interpretation of her father, Lucien Millevoye and her husband, Francis Stuart, for example, would delight her but I believe she would understand what the book tries to do.

And I like to think she might quietly approve. She was a very big person, able to get beyond her own ego in a way that the characters around her like Stuart and Maud, Yeats and Pound, were not. How did you come to write about Iseult Gonne - have you always been interested in her?

I came to her through her mother Maud, who kept popping up in my research into the Irish civil war for my first novel, Lovers’ Hollow. And I had this niggling question that wouldn’t go away: how could Willie Yeats, who had made such a career out of his unrequited love for Maud Gonne, wind ...

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.