Every weekday evening this week and next, Crooked Cross is ‘Book at Bedtime’ on BBC Radio 4. 

But of course for those of us who have already gone to bed by quarter to eleven, it’s available on catch up here. Listening with the book in hand is an interesting experience: it’s been condensed/adapted (by Sara Davies) so well. Also it’s very clever that the reader, Scarlett Courtney, has a slightly regional accent – this is because the novel is set in Bavaria and the German spoken there is very different from ‘Standard German’. 

Persephone readers who look at the daily Post will know that the week before last the subject was box sets. And one we didn’t include, but was recommended by several readers, was Tenko. Well, now we are watching it and my goodness it's good. What makes it especially watchable is knowing that it was based on truth, in fact it was inspired by a survivor’s autobiography; and although it is harrowing, because everything (and much, much worse, which obviously can’t be shown on screen) really happened, the series has added richness and fascination compared with something ‘made up’. And poignancy. And horror.

Somehow everything in our television watching and our reading always comes back to this question of verisimilitude. At Persephone Books we do not really go for fantasy. We like the truthful, the plausible, the true-to-life. Obviously millions of people do not agree with this, but there we are: maybe we are unusual, but we want to read books that bear more than a passing resemblance to reality, and indeed, some of the novels we publish are virtually documentary. 

This is a topic that often comes up in the excellent Reading Lessons: An English Teacher’s Love Letter to the Books that Shape Us by Carol Atherton, a memoir by a teacher focused on the GCSE texts she has taught over the years. But although the book is well written, and clever (who knew that one could make fifteen year-old boys interested in ‘The Last Duchess’?) it did leave us, as ever, enraged by the plodding sameness of the books she has to teach. Yet, explaining that she would indeed rather not teach The Inspector Calls yet again, she reveals why she has to: the expense of buying thirty copies of a new text. And multiply this by dozens of GCSE classes in schools up and down the country and that’s an awful lot of money spent on new books. So, if, if,  Little Boy Lost was set as a GCSE text and, say, three thousand copies had to be bought, this would be lovely for us but would cost schools £30,000 (and this is if they could get them directly from the wholesaler). Well clearly at the moment schools do not have that kind of money to spend. Which is why they plod on with the texts that are well-used but free. 

Meanwhile, we have spent most afternoons in our deckchair (cf. the Persephone Post) 

and have been rereading books, indeed rather conveniently we sometimes can’t remember having ever read them before. Then occasionally we take a leap into the completely new as recommended by Jess and Fran, towards Perfection, the new David Nicholls, Small Bomb at Dimperley and so on. But the truth is that some of us at Persephone do tend to fall back on Galsworthy or Mrs Gaskell or Nevil Shute rather than the Booker longlist. 

This is a page from the newly published Lessons for Young Artists by David Gentleman.

These tiny drawings (they are all together on one page of a small book much the same size as a Persephone book) are simply extraordinary in the way movement is conveyed in just a line. ‘I’m interested in motion,’ David writes, ‘particularly when showing people. I like groups playing football, or individuals walking on the Broad Walk in Regent’s Park, or people wandering about in street markets.’ Not just interested but a genius at conveying it. There is no doubt in our mind that David is our greatest living artist. 

And to return to the question of verisimilitude. There is a production of Hedda Gabler on in Bath at the moment, with Lily Allen as Hedda. The text has been modernised ie. retranslated with modern idioms/references and with a modern setting. However, there is something which does not translate, as follows: when Hedda returns from her honeymoon she is bored and frustrated. But when the play was written in 1890 women could not do anything and no wonder they were bored. Nowadays a woman has a choice. So when someone says to Hedda words to the effect of ‘if you’re so bored you’d better get a job’ and she responds, ‘I don’t want to get a job’, the audience just thinks: idiot, find something to do, don’t just sit around moaning, do something. Or, as the Guardian reviewer put it: ‘Her refusal to work is [hard] to understand, so Hedda seems like a spoilt princess rather than a woman trapped by, but also resisting, patriarchy.’ What this production revealed is that there are some plays that simply can’t be updated because their moral focus, their point, can’t be transposed. And Hedda Gabler is one of them. In exactly the same way there are thousands of novels that are too ‘dated’, too much of a period piece, to reprint nowadays. So then we are back with the same old conundrum: why are novelists like Hugh Walpole or Charles Morgan (once hugely successful) now too old-fashioned to revive, whereas we’d defend every single Persephone author from being labelled 'dated'?

We want to send a heartfelt ‘brava’ to Deborah Hinton, who thinks it is her duty to demonstrate (because it is not a disaster for her future if she has a criminal record) and has said: ‘This is not a terrorist organisation, it’s a direct action organisation, like the suffragists, like the Greenham Common women, like many other organisations.’ The suffragists knew, even as they were being abominably treated, that one day they would be praised by the government. And one day people will praise Deborah Hinton and the hundreds of over 60-year olds who are as brave as her. (Anyone sitting on the fence about this issue needs to read these letters in the Guardian.)

Here is a rather good piece about Jane Austen and satire. As Virginia Woolf said about Love and Freindship: 'What is this note, which never merges in the rest, which sounds distinctly and penetratingly all through the volume? It is the sound of laughter. The girl of 15 is laughing, in her corner, at the world.' And, in her inimitable and subtle way, that is what Jane Austen went on doing all her writing life.

There was a long and excellent piece by Abi Stephenson about the agony of pregnancy sickness, hyperemesis gravidarum or HG for short. It is one of those things that, if men had it, would have been cured by now because the money would have been spent on research. (Although the agony of thalidomide has certainly not helped the rush to find a cure.) Yet now it seems something has been discovered. The culprit seems to be low levels of a hormone called GDF15, and taking a booster can reduce HG. Wonderful news.

The beautiful rose garden at the White House has been paved over. In our view, there is a special corner of hell reserved for people who pave over gardens. Please don't write and tell us that a green lawn is hard to maintain during water shortages, we know that. It's the principle. And think what it will cost when more sensible values prevail and the roses return to the rose garden.

Finally, but thrillingly, yesterday the New Yorker published a piece by Rebecca Mead about Crooked Cross. She concludes: 'For modern-day readers, the novel is more than merely a historical curiosity; rather, as the critic Laura Freeman writes in her introduction, “It is a book that asks what you would do if the world went crooked, if the people you loved were persecuted, if the freedoms you believe inviolable were destroyed.” One might challenge Freeman only on her use of the conditional tense: that this is already a crooked world is hard to deny...  in the high-school classrooms of Texas and elsewhere, some American students might be worrying for the safety of their immigrant parents, while some of their disaffected peers, young men who feel that their prospects have evaporated, might be turning for employment to ICE. In Crooked Cross, the Nazis are our brothers, our sons, our sisters, ourselves. By the novel's end, even the skeptical Herr Kluger has joined the Nazi Party, in submission to the political weather, which is as inescapable as a summer storm on a deceptively peaceful mountainside, where only a moment ago it seemed that no harm could come to anyone.' 

Nicola Beauman

8 Edgar Buildings

Bath