Letters
T.S. Eliot’s preoccupations in wartime Britain
In her essay ‘A House of One’s Own’, about Vanessa Bell, Janet Malcolm says memorably that Bloomsbury is a fiction,…
Sun, sex and acid: Thom Gunn in California
San Francisco is a fantastic place… it’s terribly sunny… I am having a splendid hedonistic time here… I find myself…
Suicide was always a spectre for John Berryman
‘A matter that hurts me is that I have made many hundreds of people laugh, in various cities, during the…
A literary scoop: the passionate correspondence between R.L. Stevenson and J.M. Barrie
This book has appeared with no fuss or fanfare and yet by any account it is something of a scoop.…
A passionate wartime love story is rescued from oblivion
Once in a while, just at the right moment, a truly gorgeous real-life love story appears out of the blue,…
The marvel of Mozart’s letters
It’s 1771, you’re in Milan, and your 14-year-old genius son has just premièred his new opera. How do you reward…
Love and letters in a Bloomsbury triangle
Dora Carrington (1893–1932) was at the heart of the Bloomsbury story. As an art student, she encountered the love of…
Mary Wesley’s passionate lifelong love affair
The novelist Mary Wesley never forgot the night of 26 October 1944. She was then 32, locked in a loveless…
Charities are the last bastion of corporate greed
Charities’ fundraising practices are out of control
Nabokov’s love letters are some of the most rapturous ever written
Vladimir Nabokov was happily married for over 50 years and rarely apart from his wife. More’s the pity, discovers Philip Hensher
'God has given me a new Turkish colleague called Mustapha Kunt...'
Under normal circumstances, Simon Garfield’s chatty and informative excursion into the history of letter-writing would be a book to recommend.…
Did Leonard Bernstein do too much to be a great artist?
Nigel Simeone’s title for his edition of Leonard Bernstein’s correspondence rings compellingly, novellistically, through the force of the definite article,…
Does the world need 17 volumes of Hemingway's letters?
‘In the years since 1961 Hemingway’s reputation as “the outstanding author since the death of Shakespeare” shrank to the extent…
Darling Monster, edited by John Julius Norwich - review
It must have been awful for Diana and Duff Cooper to be separated from their only child during the war,…
To 'Flufftail' from 'Pinkpaws': The Animals is only good for celebrity-spotting
The correspondence between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy is good for celebrity-spotting but too cloyingly self-absorbed to be of wider interest, says D. J. Taylor
The wonderful, vanishing world of the handwritten letter
Peter Oborne 4 July 2015 9:00 am
In praise of the old-fashioned letter-writer