Topics of the Week

The Featured Essay: “Bon Voyage” Looks back with regret at the days of the great ocean liners.

Writing Life: “The Secret Life of Just About Everybody” recalls James Thurber’s delightful but not entirely reliable hero, Walter Mitty.

Two (almost) New Books

Not Quite a Stranger: Essays on Life in France is a collection of more or less humorous pieces recording my many visits to that beautiful and baffling country over a period of fifty years.

Lucky Man is the non-memoir that replaced the memoir I had originally intended to write, and am writing now. Various fragments of my life – mostly essays and miscellaneous non-fiction – had been accumulating like Radon gas in the basement for many decades. These I arranged into thematic sections on learning, teaching, working, travelling and so on, in a kind of biographical tapas that the curious reader can dip into at any point, according to taste.

Forthcoming from Permanent Press: another and different memoir, An Unexpected Life.

More details at Amazon.com and on the Books and Audio page of this site.

Podcasts:

All my broadcasts are now available as podcasts on iTunes and Google. Just enter my name in the Search box.