The Tumbrel Diaries

When I was a rather shy and extremely inexperienced undergraduate in the early 1980s, I indulged an immoderate enthusiasm ...

Just before Christmas I sent the following message to the editor of the Paris Review , hoping it might be included in the advice column in t...

We go the whole way back, my bear and I. His name is “Brownie,” though I’m not sure why: The threads are dappled grey, not brown, with which...

At Christmas many people draft a letter, A twelve-month circular of news and stuff. I think on balance verses can be ...

Sir Zelman Cowen, A.K., G.C.M.G., G.C.V.O., Q.C., died in Melbourne last Thursday, thirty-four years to the day since he was sworn in as the...

Just back from a busy week in London, with many more thoughts about portraiture. I suppose the vast majority of people tod...

Anniversaries are peculiar, because aside from a mere accident of the calendar there is no particular reason why Mum should seem any more ab...

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...