As we have said on the Post, this week has been rather ruined by our website being down for two and a half days. However, Charlotte, who looks after the site for us, has been absolutely brilliant, as has Miki of course, so some version of normality has been restored. Before that we had a wonderful holiday at Honfleur, Dieppe and Hole Cottage in Kent (cf. the Post). So it was a bit rough to come back to the website dramas on the first morning back at work. But all tranquil now – apart from the anxiety that it could happen again any moment: we have been assured that this won’t happen (the combination of de-bugging and paying for our own dedicated server should have helped) but one can’t help feeling anxious. As a result of all these dramas we think that this weekend we deserve a spell under the eiderdown – as in this painting, The Eiderdown by Sydney William Carline
which is in an excellent new exhibition that has just opened in Manchester and is on until 13th October. Here is another painting from the exhibition: Knitting by Raymond James Coxon.
On other matters: here is a good discussion about Someone at a Distance and here is a good blog about Heat Lightning. A reader from Germany kindly wrote to make sure we remembered that 10th May was the eightieth anniversary of the Nazis book burning on Bebel Platz in Berlin; we had forgotten but did not want to ignore that terrible anniversary. Nor did we realise that Vicky Baum’s books were thrown into the flames, nor that she wrote so many apart from the famous Grand Hotel. We shall get reading. The Quarterly Review ran a very interesting review of The Exiles Return and Natasha Walter wrote an article about feminism in the New Statesman and mentioned Round about a Pound a Week, Persephone Book No. 79. Finally, we have a new favourite photographer, Rudy Burckhardt (1914-99). Here is People looking at political posters Paris 1934.
Nicola Beauman
59 Lambs Conduit Street
Wc1N 3NB
