Press coverage
Autumn and Winter 2011

'The stories in Midsummer Night in the Workhouse describe, in unsentimental though often touching prose, young women, sometimes married, sometimes not, anticipating, enjoying, or just missing out on brief sexual encounters with men, sometimes married, sometimes not. Diana Athill writes in the preface that seeing her stories republished reminds her of how it felt to discover she could write and how it changed her life profoundly. She hopes they will give pleasure. They do, both in their own right and as a coda to a remarkable woman’s life.’ Katie Law in the Evening Standard

‘This beautiful volume of Diana Athill’s stories will delight her existing fans and win her new ones. They reveal the same wry, mischievous and essentially humane sensibility that will be familiar to readers of her memoirs. They echo the struggle to achieve sexual confidence that she has described elsewhere. But their value goes far beyond their potential biographical contribution. In her capacity to calmly and cheerfully record deep sadness she ranks among the very best writers of late 20th-century English short stories.’ Ruth Scurr in The Times

‘In 1909 Maud Pember Reeves and her colleagues in the Fabian Women’s Group started something extraordinary... a sort of Edwardian Sure Start. The breathtaking aspect of their work was not their intervention but the data they captured in the process. Round about a Pound a Week is a fascinating read full of heartbreaking detail. It was hugely influential to the pioneers of the welfare state.’ Dr Frances Wedgwood in the British Medical Journal

‘It may have been first published in 1973, but reading it again in this elegant re-print, Adam Fergusson’s The Sack of Bath remains a real shocker. The fury of his polemic against the powers in Bath that seemed hell-bent on destroying everything except a few grand Georgian set-pieces in that beautiful city still has a terrible relevance today. Looking at the photographs of acres of modest stone houses being reduced to rubble to be replaced by unbelievably low grade “comprehensive redevelopment” is utterly depressing. Even more lowering is Fergusson’s account of the elevated and titled collaborators who advised the city that to build the “new” and “iconic” was morally superior to repair and restoration. This slim volume exposed exactly how aesthetically uneducated planners and architects were some 40 years ago and they still are today.’ Colin Amery in the Spectator

‘Throughout the war Mollie Panter-Downes sent the New Yorker semi-autobiographical stories collected as Good Evening, Mrs Craven, about evacuees, the Home Guard and Red Cross sewing evenings. Here they are splendidly read by Lucy Scott. This funny, intelligent, deceptively low-key Persephone Audiobook about the Home Counties under siege is long overdue. What Clovis is to Saki, Mrs Ramsay is to Mollie Panter-Downes. Behind her watchful eyes and bright hostess smile she suffers fools venomously.’ Sue Arnold in the Guardian

‘Diana Athill’s writing career began in the 1960s with feisty short stories. In this terrific collection each tale is permeated with the sense that all individuals are ultimately alone. The action – and it’s invariably erotic action – is usually seen from the woman’s viewpoint.’ Val Hennessy in the Daily Mail

‘Life, in Diana Athill’s short stories, just doesn’t follow the scripts her protagonists have written for it. Time and again her characters surprise them-selves, only to be surprised, in their turn, by events. The results are sometimes painful, some-times startling, and nearly always extremely funny. Throughout there’s a sense that the author is as intrigued as the rest of us to know how it’s all going to end.’ Stephanie Cross in The Lady