The Tumbrel Diaries

Some weeks, propelled by routine, seem to fly past. Others are so packed with incident that the memory of seven days ago feels like a di...

A cursory survey of Victorian and Edwardian short fiction yields many characters named Trumble. Charles de Cresseron’s peculiar historical n...

Professor Hugh Christian Trumble was the son of my great-grandfather’s brother, the famous Test cricketer Hugh Trumble. Professor Trumble w...

My great-great grandfather, William Borthwick, was born near Borthwick Castle in Midlothian, not far from Edinburgh, and was certainly a dis...

Seven years and four months on, I still get a shock when I look down 8th Avenue to where the World Trade Center used to be. Profess...

Australian gazetteers offer up dozens of topographical features that carry the name of the common wombat ( Vombatus ursinus ). There i...

This is the Dean’s House in the High Street in Dunblane, which was built in 1624 by my enterprising eight times great-grandfather, The R...

I possess a photocopy of an old off-print of a lengthy article in Burke’s Colonial Gentry entitled “Pearson of Kippenross,” that was ...

At this time of year I get very sentimental about the Australian bush, not so much because I have ever thrown myself headlong into the t...