The Land of Mist: In the aftermath of the First World War, which had witnessed global carnage on an unprecedented scale, interest in spiritualism exploded across the entire western community. The intense desire to regain contact with loved ones, slaughtered on European battlefields from 1914-1918, drove otherwise sensible and hard-headed citizens into the hands of mystics, parapsychologists and cunning fraudsters, exploiting and trading in the marketplace of universal grief. They claimed, with varying degrees of plausibility, to be able to restore relationships with brothers, sons and fathers, otherwise lost forever. In that sense Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Land of Mist is a vital social document, exploring the hopes, fears and despair of a generation whose nearest and dearest had been blasted into oblivion by the guns of Ypres, Passchendaele and the Somme. The Land of Mist should be seen less as a novel and more as a chronicle of the very real sense of loss suffered by millions and their attempts, at all costs, to compensate and survive. The 'Baby Book' of Denis Stewart Percy Conan Doyle: Diaries vary, of course, in their content, and therefore their interest to other readers, but the genre as a whole should be valued as a unique form of human testament. Small scribbled pages will outlive their author in a way that few ever visualise, and with the passage of time they come to encapsulate, in some small measure, both an individual's lifetime, and the times in which he or she lived. Diarists write for themselves, and usually tell the truth as they see it. Private diaries must rank, therefore, among the most valuable of historical records. - from the Introduction by Dr Irving Finkel