The wonderful Clara Peeters again: Still Life of Fruit and Flowers. It’s at the Ashmolean. How soothing that would be: to go and visit it and then have a proper tea at the Randolph Hotel opposite. Shades of The Pursuit of Love (if there are any Persephone readers who haven’t ever read this marvellous book, we always have it on the ‘fifty books we wish we had published’ table. Yes Nancy Mitford was a snob and yes she was enraging in many ways; but this book is glorious, right up there with Middlemarch and Rebecca and Cranford).