I discovered Nicola Beauman when I read Morgan, her 1993 biography of EM Forster. It was a book that inspired me not just to re-read great swathes of Forster and enjoy them much more, but perhaps to one day have a go at literary biography myself. A decade or so of procrastination later and for the purposes of re-motivation I read Morgan for a second time and decided that if there was a blueprint for the genre then Beauman’s was it.

So I Googled the author to find out more about her and discovered that in 1998 she founded Persephone Books, a small, independent publishing company. She’s still running it and in recent years Persephone has taken off commercially.