It is rare to find someone with an interest in history and quotations, unless you restrict your search to the colleges and universities which litter our various lands, and the hidden recesses of libraries and archives within their deepest shadows. We tend to think of a historian – and often librarians too – as old…

There is a strange thing about being creative, as your profile says that you are, which many people seem to misunderstand. There is a belief that being creative means a person goes into art, paints or draws, writes books, short stories or even whimsical poems and, perhaps, even leads a Bohemian lifestyle. Naturally, that last…

I was one of those strange children, many years ago, who did not want to grow up, who did not rue the slowness of time and certainly wasn’t looking forward to being a teenager enjoying all the supposed freedoms of age and life. Rather, I took a very critical view of the passage of time…

I am caught, as the saying goes, between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand there is the clear incentive, from your profile, to write on so many different things where we, worlds and continents apart, have similar interests and, perhaps, desires. On the other there is the thought, coupled sadly with…

If I was a Victorian wife, living in the centre of London at the height of fashionable times for letter writing communication, I would, like Jane Welsh Carlyle and her Husband Thomas, probably feel personally slighted if I did not receive a letter without any explanation of why. Married couples who were separated for any…

Today I have been thinking about the strange things in life which happen to us, the coincidences, the things which seem to be really out of the ordinary and which, when we stop to think about them, make us wonder how such a small matter, through the whole of time and this world, could ever…

I will be perfectly honest and say that I am glad the practice of photocopying people’s letters and photographs and them destroying the originals is not widespread, I find it an absolutely horrific assault on the art of letter writing, and especially personal and intimate possessions such as photographs. At the same time I can…

Most of us want to be remembered in one way or another after we have left this life, want to be seen as a force for good, or as an influence, or merely as a person who has done the right thing and not wasted their short time on this planet. How that recognition comes…

I was quite old before finding any relationship between the word – or idea – Hope and religion, and that relationship was only made evident to me by someone who insisted that there could never be any form of Hope without belief, without religion, without a strict, dogmatic look at life. I discarded the idea…

It is true to say that letter writing is a challenge. In fact, most areas of writing are a challenge in our modern society, which has been caught up with these electronic communication trends, with abbreviations, and with all manner of illustrations – comic characters or whatever – now used to symbolise feelings and intended…