The Table, 1925 by Pierre Bonnard was bought by Samuel Courtauld for the Tate. What a stunning painting! Someone somewhere must have written a piece about this indissoluble link between textile manufacturing and sugar production, both so necessary but about both of which (the process! the effect of the sugar!) we are nowadays deeply ambivalent. Well at least the news is good from America.

One of the all-time great paintings, no one can feel depressed or jangled looking at this. It is of course Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. Jonathan Jones wrote about the exhibition here.

‘We are all a bundle of nerves over here [writes a reader in California] with the midterm elections. I have never seen the LA community gather and campaign like this before. I pray Wednesday morning there will be something to be cheerful about, it’s been a long time.’ It has indeed. As it has in the UK. A man came into the shop, saw the newly-in Ladybird The Story of Brexit, guessed where its sympathies lie and snorted, ‘I’m not staying here’ and went out. It was funny but also desperately sad. So this week on the Post some soothing paintings, in the form of the Impressionists newly opened at the National Gallery and lent by the Courtauld (which Persephone Books supports in a very small way). Ironically, the Impressionists weren’t viewed as soothing at the time! This is Edouard Manet Banks of the Seine at Argenteuil 1874. On long-term loan to The Courtauld Gallery from a private collection © The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London

Leonard Woolf presented the original manuscript of A Room of One’s Own to the Fitzwilliam in 1942. We are doing a Persephone edition next year, to mark the ninety years since its first publication. And have been discussing with Clara Jones, who is writing the Preface, whether we should re-set or use a facsimile of the first edition. We have decided on the latter, partly because the proof reading would be a bit nightmarish. But are hoping to reproduce some of the original handwriting.

Hardy’s handwriting: to be seen in the superb Fitzwilliam manuscript collection, details here..

A letter written by Sylvia Plath. Does this handwriting analysis makes one sceptical of graphology? Or perhaps it’s simply that graphology is itself is an art, which some people master better than others.

One of the most beloved poems in the language – and how it was written down the very first time. Here is the whole poem.