Dear Uncle Bernard – Your niece Frances – a four-eyed, French-plaited platypus awaiting the evaporation of h baby fat – thanks you very much for the romantic advice. But I’ve never been one to spend...

It makes me think that a marriage of true minds – to again quote Shakespeare – is in many ways just dumb luck.

You and I are so different: I am one word at a time one foot in front of the other, slowly, always testing how surely footing is before proceeding to the next sentence with ruminative...

I am in no mood to fulminate on paper–I wish the two of us were in a room together talking of what matters most, the air thick with affinity. In January a man crawls into...