Flash Parade was the name that the legendary Vic Loving gave to her touring company which travelled the length and breadth of Ireland and parts of England from the 1920’s to the early 1960’s. She was also known as the ‘Sequin Queen’ for lavishly made costumes used by her dancers and actors in her productions. It was unusual for a woman to run her own business never mind a large company of musicians- actors and dancers in a country that was going through some dark times.... but as those who recalled her, she brought ‘colour- gaiety and glamour’ to an otherwise grey backdrop which was Ireland of that era.... This book is just a small selection of photos in a considerable collection of other theatrical memorabilia held by Vikki Jackson. Following on from Vikki’s first book ‘Gags and Greasepaint’ this book contains further reminiscences......

The writing of women's history has witnessed a huge increase in recent decades. In the past, the focus of some of this work was the representation of the “heroine” or the “grand dame”. Recent theoretical writing, particularly as relating to historical anthropology, has focussed on a more “rounded” view of women’s historical representation and experience, however. This book explores aspects of Western visual culture and the cultures of so-called “marginal” groups, groups which have, as yet, seen little light shed on them. By analysing the discursive and “hidden” histories of a range of women artists who worked on the periphery of “mainstream” society or whose representational subjects were deemed “marginal” (Travellers, Roma (Gypsies and Circus people)), it is possible to come to some new conclusions regarding the historical relationships that have existed between different cultures and peoples. Such a process can generate a better understanding of the shifting power dynamic as between diverse historical phenomena. It is through such explorations also that we can enable the historical recovery and emergence of new identities in an increasingly multicultural world.

Leslie Wheeler was born in Devizes, Wiltshire in 1909, and in 1927 he enlisted in his local Territorial Army regiment, the Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry. Leslie served throughout the Second World War in the Middle East, North Africa, and Italy as a senior non-commissioned officer and was then commissioned as quartermaster into the regiment that he clearly loved. His honest and revealing memoirs depict the final years of horsed cavalry in the British Army, the wartime transition to mobile but poorly equipped desert columns, and finally the transition to a tank regiment. The often-overlooked 1941 campaigns in Syria, Iraq, and Persia as well as El Alamein and the fight north through Italy are described by the author in a typically understated fashion. What makes this tale unique is the often amusing and sometimes cynical perspective of a senior and experienced soldier working tirelessly in the quartermaster’s department to keep his regiment supplied in peace and war.