A 50g packet of Lyons Yellow Label Tea, first sold in Paris in the 1920s and probably bought by homesick Brits like Mary Shannon in Mariana.

Daphne du Maurier at her desk in 1944. The photgraph was taken at Menabilly, the house in Cornwall which was made famous by her 1938 masterpiece Rebecca; My Cousin Rachel was also set there. © Hans Wild for Life Magazine

Mollie and Stella 1937 by Bernard Fleetwood-Walker (who did the painting for the front of the Classic edition of Mariana) was recently for sale at Agnew's at the  British Art Fair.

'Counting the Stars' by Edith Wharton (1862-1937), sent in a letter to her childhood governess Anna Bahlmann. Left in storage for ninety years, the letters between them were discovered by the Bahlmann family and auctioned this summer. © Christie's Images 2009

Griff House in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, the childhood home of George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans, 1819-1880). The house was renovated in 2004 and is now, bizarrely, a barbeque restaurant and pub.

Michael Palin said in his 2008 documentary about Vilhelm Hammershoi (1864-1916), 'the key to Hammershoi is that he deliberately did not want us to know him. He was an artist. He painted pictures. The rest is silence.' 

Interior of Scott of the Antarctic's hut, officially Terra Nova hut at Cape Evans, which has remained much as it was when it was abandoned in 1912. It was prefabricated in England and sent south by ship; during the winter of 1911-12 twenty-five men lived here. 

This picture by Steven Dohanos 1907-94 (thanks to RK for the attribution) has been used to illustrate  the entire nineteen hours broadcast (click on 'This is a rather unique link') on CBS's WJSV in Washington DC seventy years ago today, 21st September 1939. The recordings were digitised by the University of Virginia.  The picture is actually an advertisement for beer.

The Omega Exhibition at the Courtauld ends this weekend. Here is 'Pamela', a 1913 printed linen often attributed to Duncan Grant which we used for William an Englishman in a different colour. 'Its cloud-like squiggles, rainbow-shaped arcs and black lines that branch out create a sense of abstraction derived from nature...consistent with Bloomsbury paintings of the time' (Catalogue). 

Still in France, Mausanne 1938 is by Frederick Gore who died on August 31st aged 95 (not to be confused with his father, the Camden Town Group painter Frederick Spencer Gore). © Private Collection

A cleverly-drawn ad for the San Francisco Book Co in Paris. The woman in the patterned dress is asking her companion, 'Have you ever read Dorothy Whipple?'

The Music Lesson by Matisse 1917  ©  The Barnes Foundation, Lincoln University, Merion, PA. This is one of those paintings which is a short story in itself, the kind of thing writers like Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf or Elizabeth Taylor wanted to capture in words.

Gustav Mahler 1860-1911, another hero. Last week there was a fantastic Proms performance of his Tenth Symphony (Deryck Cooke's version) by the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra.

Subway NYC 1994 by Charlotte Johnson Wahl. Today is the day when our thoughts are especially with New York.

A 1920s postcard of the bathing machines at Bognor Regis, loved by the Stevens family in Persephone book no.67 The Fortnight in September. Taken from Fred Gray's book Designing the Seaside.

The cover for the American edition of Persephone Book No. 26.

This amazing 1945 painting by Vanessa Bell, Charleston Drawing Room, is for sale at Messum's (but for rather a large sum of money!). The curtain fabric, however, is available at the Charleston shop; and is to be found on the endpapers of Good Things in England.

This photograph was taken exactly a hundred years ago, in September 1909, and shows the amazing Emmeline Pankhurst (fourth from the right) with other suffragettes.

This poster of the Sussex Downs hangs in the office. It is on our website illustrating Good Evening, Mrs Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes and is the twin of the Frank Newbould poster we put on the Post on 26th May this year. In London yesterday it was amazing weather and all day we were reminded of the sparkling sunshine on 3rd September 1939, when people came out of church or came in from the garden and found that war had been officially declared.

A September 1939 government poster urging women to register their children for evacuation. Cf. Persephone book no. 60 Doreen by Barbara Noble.

A recruitment poster for the Women's Voluntary Service which by 1939 had 165,000 members: tomorrow is the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II. © Imperial War Museum.

There are altogether six different 'Circus' plates in this 1934 set, which was designed by Laura Knight and produced by Clarice Cliff for AJ Wilkinson's.