Letter

The news came through last week that the film of Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is being released in the UK in August. We discovered this in an article about the film in the Observer and were touched to see that the journalist who wrote the story had remembered Emily Hill’s comment way back last year – that ‘when you have finished reading Miss Pettigrew you want to put on a frock and go out to a party’: a wonderful summing-up of both book and film.

Do read this article in the last issue of the New Statesman about Hamburg – it makes a poignant accompaniment to Tilly Wolff-Monckeberg’s description of life there in On the Other Side. And in the same issue there is an article about documentary films celebrating Land of Promise: the British Documentary Movement 1930-50, a thirteen hour four disc set of fascinating archive material (including the previously hard to find A Diary for Timothy, which we showed at the BFI recently).

The original Joan Hunter-Dunn died recently - here is a recording of John Betjeman reading the poem, and here is a picture of her. Alice Thomson wrote about her in the Telegraph and mentioned two of our books, How To Run your Home without Help and Daddy's Gone a Hunting.

I am writing this from Hollywood where it is warm and sunny, in contrast to the pouring rain they are having in the UK!  Now off to Washington and New York, the former for a Persephone Tea in Georgetown and the latter for a Sales Conference organised by our American distributor, Consortium.

Nicola Beauman
Los Angeles
30 April 2008