The Tumbrel Diaries

Lately I have commenced the awesome task of sorting through and identifying the Trumble family papers that are ultimately destined for the N...

A generous colleague from the Ohio State University has lately written to ask me whether, when writing The Finger: A Handbook , I had ever...

One of my favourite anthologies contains mostly brief items of correspondence, many of them in code or cipher, that were prin...

I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of aesthetic experiences that one would willingly call life-changing—and I have a full set...

I have been thinking quite a lot about portraiture lately, specifically an oddly widespread trope that crops up regularly in many British so...

The Yup’ik are aboriginal people of the Russian Far East and of western Alaska. The village of Quinhagak, Alaska—population 680—is primarily...

Lately I received a courteous message from a gentleman who recalled having been shown over the state rooms of Government House, Melbourne, b...

One of the strangest art clichés that still circulates endlessly—and I heard it again yesterday uttered by somebody who really ought to know...

I have only ever known one continental noblewoman, and even then only slightly. Somehow it seems absolutely right that I should have been in...

The Ladies of Bethany, an order of Dutch nuns, were infinitely kind to me. I first met them when I stayed briefly in their guesthouse in Rom...