Last week saw the publication of Persephone Book No. 151, Mrs Miniver, and the Classic edition of High Wages. We had a small party on the first floor to celebrate  – champagne, smoked salmon sandwiches, a chance to admire Libby Dillon’s marvellous paintings which are installed there for another week, and some top-quality conversazione between Fran and Ysenda Maxtone Graham who wrote the Preface –  and we raised a glass to Jan Struther. 

The other occasion when a glass was raised was at the Women of the Year Lunch. The prize for courage went to Yulia Navalnaya and hearing her speak was incredibly moving: we all stood up and clapped and clapped. She is both brave and beautiful, simply to be in her presence was something never to be forgotten. Extracts from her speech are in inews here.

Next weekend the clocks go back and, as ever, none of us in the UK will be able to understand why it will be lighter first thing in the morning in order for it to be dark at teatime; but however much we all rail against ‘the ending of British Summer time’, as it is called, nothing is ever done to reverse this annoying state of affairs.  One day… And of course there are far, far more important things to be achieved first, ranging from a two-state solution at one end of the scale to banishing plastic-wrapped vegetables at the other...

So there is a new challenge now that some of us are (partially) retired. We resolved to be the kind of granny that has a cake in a tin when/if the grandchildren call in on their way back from school. Jane Brocket gave us a copy of her cake book and we planned to work through it.

However, grandchild number 3 asked whether next week instead of dundee cake (cake number 2) it could be orange cake (we are gathering he doesn’t really like dried fruit) and of course we said it could. Nevertheless, the plan is to make every cake in the book, even if in a different order. 

We are extremely pleased that Han Kang has won the Nobel Prize. But here in Bath the greater excitement was that last week ‘our’ author Adam Fergusson was given the Freedom of the City of Bath. This was because his book, PB No. 93 The Sack of Bath, first published in 1973, was instrumental fifty years ago in stopping the demolition of the buildings in Bath that the council had decided should go in order to make way for modern replacements. Of course by then many disasters had already happened and even a quick glance at the photographs in The Sack of Bath makes one weep. Also there is a bitter irony about the Mayor’s office’s press release saying that he wrote his book ‘in response to the unprecedented loss of large swathes of the Georgian city’ when it was the very same office which was responsible, but there we are. Nevertheless, Adam’s honour is hugely deserved although we are not sure what it actually means: perhaps free ale for life, or free car parking, or probably just the honour. (There have been twenty-five honorary freemen since 1797, the best-known of whom were Nelson, Lloyd George, Haile Selassie and Yehudi Menuhin.)

So: the Bath Christmas Market runs from Thursday November 28th for two and half weeks, here  is the list of stallholders. In fact, that Thursday is the very day we are having an informal Persephone trip to the Tirzah Garwood exhibition at Dulwich, informal in the sense that we are not asking people to book with us but to go under their own steam and then meet up with us and other Persephone readers in the café or in the exhibition. Btw, the Observer ran a long piece about Tirzah by our preface writer Rachel Cooke (she wrote the Preface to Harriet) and, reproduced several of the wonderful woodcuts. How nice it would have been if the piece mentioned that Tirzah's memoir Long Live Great Bardfield is in print, has sold 11,000 copies and counting, and is now an e-book as well.

Very sadly, Lore Segal has died, the New Yorker wrote about her here; the Stirling Prize for Architecture was won by the stations of the Elizabeth Line, hurrah; there is a Vanessa Bell exhibition in Milton Keynes;  

and in honour of this summer's Barbara Pym conference in Oxford we re-watched the really excellent programme 'Miss Pym's Day Out' here.

A request: does anyone know any of the people who make decisions about the GCSE and A Level syllabus? We are getting so tetchy hearing from the grandchildren about some of the dire choices they are made to read that we have resolved to be a bit more proactive in trying to suggest Persephone books such as Little Boy Lost or The Call or Despised and Rejected as set texts.

If you have ordered a book from us in the last week you will have noticed that the price has gone up to £15 (or £40 for three) for the Greys and £12 for the Classics; we are sad and sorry about this but really we had no choice.

A reader wrote and told us that Littlecote Roman Villa near Hungerford has an image of Persephone in the mosaic decoration: 'as you entered the room from the eastern end, you would be faced by Demeter and Persephone – "the chief deities of Elysium"' (Persephone is apparently bottom left).

Here is a quote from Martha Gellhorn’s A View from the Ground (1989): in 1952 she spent six weeks in Haiti and ‘one morning Monsieur Réné appeared with a book. He said it was the only book in English in the library, where I was always the only customer. No one could read English but perhaps it would interest me. The book was E M Forster’s Two Cheers for Democracy [now PB no. 146]. A miracle of the highest order. Oh, that beautiful book! It shines with reason, mercy, honour, good will and wit; and is written in those water-smooth sentences that one wants to stroke for the pleasure of feeling them. No longer isolated, I had Mr Forster’s mind for company. When I finished the book, I wrote pages to Mr Forster, like a letter in a bottle, telling him that he was a light in the darkness and a moral example to mankind. I resolved to reform.’ 

Finally, last week we had a little treat in London, wandering up and down the divine Chiltern Street. We went to the fantastic Labour and Wait and bought a soap dish, tea towels and incense and to Monocle to buy The Monocle Book of Gentle Living, which is all about baking cakes for grandchildren (kind of thing) and walking in bare feet on the dew-dappled grass, hmmm.

Nicola Beauman

8 Edgar Buildings, Bath