Letter

Last Sunday's Remembrance Day seemed to have a new power.  The BBC has been relating it more and more to the deaths and injuries that British soldiers have been suffering in Iraq and Afghanistan. We commemorated it among the autumn leaves of Arundel Castle park, where ninety years ago our predecessors could have sometimes heard the guns on the Western Front.  Persephone's very first book was William - an Englishman, a once almost forgotten novel about the naivety of the well-meaning English in 1914, faced with a ruthlessness and brutality for which they were quite unprepared.  Our first biography was Nicholas Mosley's Julian Grenfell, in which highly civilised poet, Julian, explains to his aristocratic mother Etty just why the flower of English youth positively wanted to go to war in 1914.

Perhaps the most lasting of all accounts of the Great War is R C Sherriff's frequently revived play, Journey's End. By 1938 the once-cheerful Sherriff was gloomily anticipating the outbreak of another World War, and it was this that spurred him to write The Hopkins Manuscript (Persephone Book No 57). The story is based on the terrifying metaphor of the moon crashing into the earth and mankind's unpreparedness to cope. Back in June 2005 when we published it, we suggested that it could come to be seen as a metaphor for climate change, the new challenge of which humanity seemed to be almost totally unaware.  Since then a lot has happened - climate change has hardly been out of the headlines: at the July 2005 Gleneagles Summit, the British government put it firmly top of the agenda, during 2006 Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth woke people up in much of the world, the Stern Review then told us how much it could cost, and parliament is now considering the first-ever Climate Change Bill.

In The Hopkins Manuscript, the story starts with a scientific conference at which the terrifying truth is set out secretly to a very select group. In 2007 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been publishing the latest agreed scientific conclusions to the world.  Compared to 2001, when they last reported, the climate scientists are more certain of the dangers and the need for urgent change. But a number of scientists think they do not go far enough, for example James Lovelock who published his book, The Revenge of Gaia in 2006. On October 29 Lovelock spoke at the Royal Society his talk is now accessible by webcam on the website. Lovelock believes that a number of "tipping-points" are now inevitable, that we must prepare to adapt (for example, through providing for the many refugees who will certainly come to northern Europe), and that we must consider radical solutions, such as changing the chemistry of the oceans. What was extraordinary was that none of the distinguished scientists present challenged his pessimism - as the chairman said in summing up, "there were no Nay-sayers".

And today, as I write this, we are having a lunch in the shop to celebrate the publication of On the Other Side.  Also, please buy Time Out this week, where you will find a lovely mention of us on page 60!