Commissario Guido Brunetti, a Venetian police inspector, is Donna Leon’s fictional resident of San Polo. He speaks “Veneziano” and admires those who do so with a specific sestiere accent—from Castello. The crime writer Donna Leon has lived in Cannaregio, the closest sestiere to the railway station, where Venetians who still work and live in the […]

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Despite our times of comfort and plenty, optimism is under assault. Pessimism is leaping to the attack. Optimism appears to have fewer and fewer adherents. While natural temperament, derived from heredity or environment or both, is the foundation, philosophical conviction builds on it, sometimes in surprising ways. An illustration of this is the case of […]

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The very first time I stepped on stage was in 1965 when a teacher from the Lake Erie Girls’ College French Club, in Painesville, Ohio, asked a teacher at my high school if there were any boys who were proficient enough in the language to play the role of Mascarille in a production of Moliere’s […]

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13/9/16 My fiddling towards abandon I have agreed to give a talk later today at a Poetry Symposium on the subject of how and why I revise my work. I’m a little uneasy the topic distracts from any more useful matter that might be raised regarding my art, and that my revisions are not really […]

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I usually ask taxi drivers where they come from. It often leads to an interesting journey. When a recent driver said Assyria, I was bowled over. I told him he was the first Assyrian I had met in my life and that I had learnt a poem about the Assyrians at school. I then launched […]

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21/1/15 The blessings This summer evening has been one of distractions. It is my turn to make dinner. I have read and made sharp ripostes to the e-mail material coming in from my colleague-sceptics on the Climate Change wrangle. I have sent off suitably witty birthday greeting to an old love. How take pause? How […]

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Land that was once open fields filled with nonchalantly grazing cows and the occasional horse is now covered by tarred roads and tile-and-brick villas. Slim Dusty once agisted his team there. Suburbia has usurped the flat flood-plain I once roamed as a budding Robin Hood. It is sad to see it vanish without a requiem. […]

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20/5/06 The very joy I’ve now appraised nearly all the dossiers I must read for our June Literature Board session. This will be my seventeenth meeting and penultimate appearance for the appointment which I reckon to have been a fair call on my time, where I have been able to give back to my patrons […]

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It was perhaps providential that the Diocesan Book Society closed when it did, rather than see it forced to adapt and accommodate the modern world of book merchandising. It was nice to know that you could look at books for hours and no one seemed to care whether you bought anything

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All that remains to me are memories of the violets' scent, an abiding admiration for my grandmother's strength and courage, Sin Yung's utter joy in his work and, of course, Jack from the humpy by the creek who left no footprint on the earth that he trod

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