Dear Editor, I am sitting in P’s study, at the solid commodious desk which you know so well; it has a glass top under which he has stuck picture postcards from all over Europe. It is Friday, 23 August, night is falling: the fourth night after the invasion. I have spent the day, as I spent the others since the Russians came here, walking the streets of Prague and talking to friends in this most beautiful of old cities. Several times I have crossed Charles Bridge where we stood with you and Nina—how long ago was it, only about a […]

My freedom from certain fears does not include tolerance of snakes. From infancy my elders implanted in me: their own fear of these reptiles and it took root and grew to an unconquerable revulsion. Even pictured snakes horrify me; the presence of one where I could not escape it would surely reduce me to a paralyzed jelly in terror. Today in areas where snakes are not known the slightest rustle in grass or underbrush will cause me involuntarily to spring away from it. ‘Dear me, what a state your nerves must be in!’ someone will remark, but it is merely […]

When I returned to London, in 1910, it was with a little more assurance than I had felt a few years earlier. Then I had been intensely conscious of my youth, my lack of experience, my incapacity for anything but a kind of literary beachcombing, gathering fragments for obscure publishers — The Proverbs of Japan, The Proverbs of China, The Potted Policy of Parnell. Through a chance meeting with Lionel Lindsay in Sydney I had been admitted to an attic near the British Museum that had once sheltered him and had still one of his abandoned self-portraits on the wall. […]