And the other endpaper this month, also on display in the shop.

Eighty years ago today was the morning after the two nights before of the Bath Blitz. This was the Regina Hotel just at the back of our shop in Edgar Buildings.

David Garnett was painted by Dora Carrington in 1919 when he was 27. He had been a friend of Edward Thomas  – they met through David's father Edward Garnett, the publisher. Fifteen years later David was asked to write Edward Thomas's biography but refused; in the end it was written by John Moore, whose Waters Under the Earth we publish in October. The  biography is long out of print but is absolutely excellent.

So the new Persephone Biannually should be arriving in the UK, alas not abroad unless paid for on the website (for years we used to send it abroad free but now the customs difficulties and postage costs has made that impossible). This week on the Post: some images from the Biannually. (Which will by the way be in the Biannually Archive the next few days, and of course anyone abroad with a good colour printer could print it out, staple it together and voilà. Here, first of all, is the painting on the cover, which is in the Bristol Museum and attributed to Thomas Pole, it has been dated to 1805 by the dress. The setting is 14 St James's Square, Bristol which was alas demolished in the 1960s.

So there is a good Tory who is still an MP: Tom Tugendhat. He has a rather interesting website too. Let's all have fantasies that the present government is toppled very very soon and Tom T becomes Prime Minister. We do not allow ourselves to hope for a general election and for the Tories to be out of power; but we do hope for someone decent and honourable and kind to lead the nation. On another subject – the new Persephone Biannually should be arriving today or tomorrow in the UK and next week the Post will have five pictures from the current PB.

Rachel Reeves has been on the Post before because she has written a preface for us. But just look at her smile and her eyes. Could we imagine her lying to us? We could not. Here is the entire Shadow Cabinet, it's rather cheering looking at the pictures. There are better times ahead...

What we have to remember as the cesspit at the heart of the UK government  makes all of us really quite depressed – there are some very good Tories. Of course they have been chucked out of parliament, that goes without saying, but they are there, in the background. This is Dominic Grieve, who is intelligent, kind, witty, decent. Yes, he may be a Tory, but in the old days we did not mind if people were Tories. That was the political system, the left and the right. That, however, was before this present bunch of charlatans. Yet surely better times will come. Cheeringly, today is the day we refit the shop window ready for the publication of the two new books tomorrow. Now that is something positive and hopeful.