The merry mind
The actress Ingrid Bergman had a short relationship with the photographer Robert Capa. I love this quotation from a letter...
My kind of letter
Love receiving 'real' letters, and so was thrilled to find this beautiful envelope in the letter box, apparently made from...
Letters on a clothes line
Picasso seems to have had an ambivalent relationship to letters. He tortured himself by reading tirades from his ex-wife, and...
Plus ça change…
There’s something reassuring in seeing that what appears an ‘issue’ today appeared equally so to people long ago. It puts...
Mail at last
We forget, swamped as we are with constant connectivity, the past hunger for letters and news when travelling. I remember...
Red letter day
A red letter day is a holiday or a memorable day, something that might be marked on the calendar in...
The innovation of envelopes
They’re so ubiquitous that it’s a surprise to learn envelopes were a mid-nineteenth century invention. Somewhere in Gaskell I remember...
The scrutiny that precedes reading
Yes, there is that small ceremony that precedes the reading of a letter, particularly a hand-written one delivered by post. ...
High fashion, slow post
One of the features of postal correspondence is its slowness, probably a key contributor to its slow demise, though perhaps...
Letters unopened
We use the term ‘back of the envelope’ to capture the notion of jotting down an idea or plan on...
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