The Informed Air: Essays

My most memorable New Year's Eve

Note on my story "The gentile Jewesses"

The celestial garden party

What images return

Comment on "The poet's house"

The poet's house

Footnote to "The poet's house"

John Masefield

The writing life

My Madeleine

How I became a novelist

London exotics

A drink with Dame Edith

Living in Rome

Tuscany by chance

When I was ten

My book of life

Pens©♭e: Scottish education

The desegregation of art

The art of verse

Pens©♭e: T.S. Eliot

The wisdom of Mr T.S. Eliot

The short story

Pens©♭e: Biography

The book I would like to have written, and why

Pens©♭e: the supernatural

The books I re-read and why

Robert Burns

Emily Bront©±

The Bront©±s as teachers

My favourite villain: Heathcliff

Mrs Gaskell

Mary Shelley: wife to a genius

Frankenstein and The last man

Mary Shelley (author's note and proposal for a critical biography)

Shelley's last house

The essential Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson

Celebrating Scotland

Simenon: a phenomenal writer

The Golden Fleece

Eyes and noses

Love

How to write a letter

Our dearest Emma

Venice

Ravenna: city of mosaics

Fuzzy young person

Decorative art

Daughter of the soil

The first Christmas Eve

A pardon for the guy

Ritual and recipe

Letter from Rome: the elder statesmen

The sermons of Newman

An exile's path

Newman's journals

The religion of an agnostic

An unknown author

The mystery of Job's suffering

The only problem

Ailurophilia

The next world and back.