Old age makes caricatures of us all.

No literary form is more revealing, more spontaneous or more individual than a letter.

We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it.

Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.

A letter is paradoxically the most revealing and the most deceptive of confessional revelations. We all have our inconsistencies, prejudices, irrationalities which, although strongly felt at the time, may be transitory. A letter captures the mood of the moment. The transitory becomes immutably fixed, part of the evidence for the prosecution or the defence.

Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically, it both revealed and diminished identity.

A man who lives with nature is used to violence and is companionable with death. There is more violence in an English hedgerow than in the meanest streets of a great city.