The Restaurant is the current watch, and very watchable it is – a mixture of all the soaps one has ever seen: Downton Abbey, Foyle's War, A Place to Call Home, Heimat are all referenced. This is Calle and Nina and how they manage to keep one interested in them isn't at all obvious but somehow they do. We have just got to the episode when Suzanne comes to Stockholm ten years on because she has written a book about her ghastly experiences during the war; one cannot imagine this will be an uneventful book tour...

And then we watched Shtisel. Very very mixed feelings about this, which there is no way of defining in a blog post. It is fascinating and moving and eye-opening but also enraging and irritating and boring (all those men! Rocking back and forth! In hats!).Nevertheless we wouldn't have missed it for anything.

Grace and Frankie came next, roughly autumn and early winter last year. It was watchable and Jane Fonda is a true phenomenon but the two ex-husbands become wearisome after a while and the vibrator theme isn't either funny or heart-warming. BUT there are many excellent storylines eg  Grace's relationship with her children, Frankie with hers, and the script is so good. (Watch out for the episode directed with huge intelligence by Michael Showalter, son of Elaine Showalter, the great expert on women's writing: some of her preoccupations have very much filtered down to him.)

Call my Agent or Dix pour cent is probably the best series, box set, whatever we are calling them, of all: it's funny and profound, it has great plot lines, the actors are magnifique, it makes Paris heartrendingly beautiful for those of us who can't get there and for anyone who has ever had an agent it's great therapy. Highly highly recommended. This is Matthias's wife Catherine (Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu). (She is also in Emily in Paris which raised that slightly dire series from almost impossible to tolerate to actually not that bad.)

This week on the Post: soaps or dramas or television series or box sets or whatever we choose to call them. First off, the series (because it isn't a soap) that kept us going during the first lockdown last spring – Anne with an E. It wouldn't have been something that us Persephone girls would watch normally. But it was recommended by someone very very intellectual (no name dropping here) and we tried and were hooked. All during March and April we lived in Anne's world. The actress playing her was superb, and so were Geraldine James (revered ever since The Jewel in the Crown, actually the best series that has EVER been on television) and Timothée Chalamet (whose character, Gilbert, was the source of the office dog's name).

Shirley Williams's godmother was Winifred Holtby, author of The Crowded Street (and so much else). She died when Shirley was only 5 and this was the other great grief of Vera Brittain's years as a mother. But Shirley came through all the sadness and forged her own inimitable path. Martin Kettle wrote about her ideals in the Guardian yesterday, here, and quoted her saying 'I have never understood or accepted that some people, through the accident of birth, should be so much richer, have so much greater opportunities and better access to education, healthcare and good housing than others.' Hear, hear a thousand times over. But then Kettle explains that Shirley's great gift was her willingness to compromise. If only present-day politicians had this gift. But they don't and we are where we are. It was a better world when Shirley Williams was in it.



Clare Leighton, also  "lived her early life in the shadow of her older brother, Roland – her mother's favourite; the family nickname for Clare was 'the bystander'. Her mother was dismissive of Clare's looks, ambitions and talents, while she said of Roland that 'he is the only one of my children who is beautiful enough to be worth dressing' (what a terrible thing to say!!). Nevertheless, Clare's 1947 biography of her mother Tempestuous Petticoat: the story of an Invincible Edwardian succeeded in 'making her readers envy this fantastic mother'". This is the beautiful Clare Leighton woodcut we have used to illustrate Mariana since we first reissued it in 1999.