For the Diary, which chronicles the day-to-day life of a wife and mother living in the country, is above all fun, in fact it is one of the funniest books ever written. And yet the humour is of a particular, Mr Pooter-ish type: an earlier EM Delafield novel had on its frontispiece a quote from The Diary of a Nobody: ‘I left the room with silent dignity, but caught my foot in the mat.’ We recommend it to any Persephone reader who loved, for example, Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love because, as the Afterword to the Diary observes: ‘Self-deprecation of this kind is a particularly English occupation, one which foreigners find rather hard to understand. From Emma through Cranford, to The Diary of a Nobody, EF Benson’s Lucia books, 1066 and All That and Mrs Miniver, to name but a few of the links in the chain, they are all books in which the English laugh at their own peculiarities. They are also books which make light of the potentially grave and which subtly transform tragedy into pathos and pathos into humour.’ Which is why the trivial (bulbs) is so often bracketed with the serious (the war) as in the opening entry: ‘November 7^th 1929 Lady B stays to tea. We talk some more about bulbs, the Dutch School of Painting, Our Vicar’s Wife, sciatica, and All Quiet on the Western Front.’