Persephone life continues in its normal rhythm, thanks to you, our marvellous readers. The shop is always full (although, thankfully, very rarely too full); we have just taken delivery of a few advance copies of our autumn book, Her Son’s Wife by Dorothy Canfield Fisher; the new Pamphlet has gone to the printer; and on we go. 

The best bit of news among all the grimness (which let's ignore for a few minutes) is that 'rewilded land remains green amid drought-stricken English countryside,' more here. This is so, so cheering. What most of us can’t understand, as we gasp for breath in the heat, is why we aren’t doing more initiatives like this. Presumably there are in fact hundreds of scientists working away trying to find a method of zapping carbon so it doesn’t destroy the planet. But apart from that, there is so little being obviously done: in the UK we still allow people to pave over their front gardens, fly as often as they want, buy an SUV, continue to rip up the countryside in order to build the utterly pointless HS2. One has to look to Paris for forward-looking plans. Here they have made a huge effort to clean up the Seine for swimmers. And now they have planted a forest (yes, a forest) outside the City Hall. Below is before and after.

But our big news is that we have discovered a method of grooming Gilbert, the office dog. The homeopathic vet, quiet genius that he is, recommended Nutracalm and little bits of cheddar. Well, the Nutracalm doesn’t make Gilbert sleepy as we hoped, but he loves the taste, with the cheddar, and who knows maybe it has a calming influence. Anyway, twenty minutes gentle clipping while he scoffs little bits of cheese has ensured that he looks as groomed and cosseted as anyone could wish. As cosseted indeed as the dogs in two recent, absolutely excellent dog books. One is The Dog’s Gaze by Thomas Laqueur

and the other is Yap: A Short History of Small Dogs by Stephanie Howard-Smith (the latter was an advance copy, it's published in October). This remark is annoying for the fifty per cent of people who aren't dog lovers – but these two books simply made our summer.

Charlotte Higgins wrote in her Guardian newsletter about  Out of the Window, PB No. 148: ‘I turned to a novel by my Guardian ancestress Madeline Linford, who began as an advertising assistant, reported on the humanitarian crisis in post-first world war Poland, started the women’s page and pioneered film criticism (or “kinema” criticism, as editor CP Scott insisted it be spelled). What I hadn’t realised was that she was a fine novelist as a young woman – a pursuit that, alas, she gave up to concentrate on journalism. I’m thoroughly enjoying her 1930 Manchester-set novel of love across class barriers, Out of the Window.’ 

David Olusoga has started a new series about a house in Edinburgh (our book set there is of course House-Bound by Winifred Peck, PB no. 72, about life in wartime when the heroine Rose can’t find a cook and has to do the cooking herself). We simply love A House Through Time, as the series is called, we wish all history was like this instead of a roll call of battles and treaties and wars and men behaving badly. Which is why our favourite television programmes ever were the 'House' series, when a family lived for six months as though they were a Victorian or an Edwardian or a 1940s family. The late, lamented Juliet Gardiner then wrote very good books about their experiences, which are still very much worth reading.

There was a repeat of a 2010 BBC documentary about Operation Mincemeat (the origin of PB No. 51 Operation Heartbreak by Duff Cooper). It is fascinating on many levels, one of which is seeing the real life 'Pam' (Nancy Jean Leslie), another is that this excellent programme was presumably the inspiration for the rollicking musical of the same name.

We have just read Claire Harman's biography of Katherine Mansfield, author of The Montana Stories, PB No. 25. This has the extraordinary detail that several hundred copies of her first book In a German Pension, published when she was only 23, were shipped to the USA on the Titanic... 

Two wonderful-sounding exhibitions, one we have a good chance of getting to and one, realistically,  we won’t.  At Rottingdean, pretty accessible from Bath, there is an exhibition of EQ Nicholson and John Craxton. We have always been fascinated by EQ, ever since using her wonderful Black Goose fabric as the endpaper for Farewell, Leicester Square, PB No. 14.

The other exhibition, which is in New York and we are unlikely to get there, is about the Women of the Wiener Werkstätte and again we have been fascinated by them since using a Wiener Werkstätte fabric, called 'Paul' designed in 1927  by Clara Posnanski, for Manja by Anna Gmeyner, PB No. 39.

Here is one of the textiles in the exhibition:

Finally, more trivially, but perhaps not (and it is August after all) we have made a resolution: to have puddings more often. Today's lemon pudding with vanilla ice cream rounded off a meal in a way that nothing else can, so we have returned to the pudding section of the Persephone cookbooks (did you know that there are ten of them?) and in future marmalade pudding, bread and butter pudding, Eve's pudding and so on will often be on the menu. Combine 2 oz butter and 4 oz sugar, stir in 2 oz s.r. flour, two egg yolks, the juice of two lemons, a little bit of milk, finally stir in the two whipped egg whites, bake for half an hour till lightly brown. 

Nicola Beauman,

8 Edgar Buildings,

 Bath.