Press Coverage Autumn 2004

Persephone was on Radio 4's Today programme on the day the Orange Prize was announced: James Naughtie interviewed Nicola Beauman about why 'our' writers are better than any on the shortlist. The BBC had asked for the end of the flap quote for Mollie Panter-Downes's Good Evening, Mrs Craven to be read out to the listening nation as an example of a sentence more beautiful than any written today. 'It stayed in my head all day' someone said. For those who missed the programme here it is: 'All over London telephone bells were ringing angrily though empty rooms over which the fine brick dust, seeping in at the shuttered windows, was beginning to settle.'

In The Spectator Anthony Sampson, the biographer of Mandela, wrote: ‘The World that was Ours has survived as a South African classic while most other memoirs about life under apartheid have been forgotten. It’s not just because it’s beautifully written, in a plain, unpretentious style, but also because it conveys, with acute observation, the combination of ordinariness and danger which is implicit in any totalitarian state. The author quotes WH Auden: “Suffering...takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.” And she quietly conveys her own suffering as a political activist who was also a dedicated mother of young children, facing growing persecution, fear and exile... Hilda Bernstein provides the most vivid account, of the many I have read, of the historic Rivonia Trial of Mandela and his colleagues. She movingly describes the different responses of the accused as they faced ferocious questioning from the vindictive prosecutor Percy Yutar. And she becomes fascinated by the “psychology of betrayal”, which caused former comrades to testify against their friends.’ Her story is both extraordinary and ordinary; and it is the combination which makes it so moving and memorable.’

The World that was Ours was discussed on BBC Radio London’s ‘Word for Word’: Jenny Linford chose this ‘really fascinating book’ as one of her three titles of the week. As well as admiring its insight, she found it ‘really powerful: every now and and then these emotions suddenly flood through. Like the bit when the sentence is announced, actually I was reading it on the Tube and I had tears in my eyes because it was so emotional. Really – I’d recommend it. It’s published by a small publisher called Persephone Books who do the most fascinating books, and I must say I haven’t read a bad Persephone book, they’re always intelligently chosen, and a bargain at £10.’

Summer reading: ‘I want Persephone Books’ entire list of “rescued” writers’ Shena Mackay told the Observer, while in The Tablet Mary Blanche Gibbs chose ‘two exquisite new paperbacks, Bricks and Mortar and The World that was
Ours, that have just arrived in the post from Persephone’s wonderful range of forgotten writers.’

The repubication of Helen Ashton’s sedate 1932 novel Bricks and Mortar won’t set the world alight,’ wrote Chris Power in The Times, ‘but the story of architect Martin Lovell and his malfunctioning marriage is affecting, and all the more appealing for Ashton’s irony and wit. The novel, beginning in 1892 and ending in 1931, offers a fascinating portrait of shifts within the class system.’

In Image magazine Anna Carey called Bricks and Mortar ‘a charming family saga’ while Amanda Blinkhorn in the Hampstead & Highgate Express described it as ‘entertaining and spiky’.

Leicestershire Life reviewed The Casino by Margaret Bonham, ‘who was what Nancy Mitford would have called a bolter. She married three times, leading a determinedly bohemian life with a love of exotic cars, socialists and gin. The result of this lifestyle is a collection of short stories as fresh as when they were first published in 1948, sharp, wittily-perceptive character sketches drawn mostly with affection, sometimes venom, but always with an eye for the individual. Margaret Bonham really is a writer who deserves wider recognition and affection.’