Shades of London

I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to be Rory Deveaux for Halloween. I already have the basic looks — dark hair, fair skin, round face. Clothes are no problem — jeans, T-shirt, vintage black velvet jacket — because they are my clothes.  Red lipstick? Check. Southern accent? Got it. Just need to pick up [...]

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Happy birthday, Holmes

January 6 has long been considered the birthday of the great detective Sherlock Holmes by members of the Baker Street Irregulars, the foremost society of Holmes’ scholars and enthusiasts. That Holmes is the fictional creation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle matters not. As T.S. Eliot wrote in a 1929 review of  The Complete Sherlock Holmes [...]

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Yes to the dress

I’d like to think of my clothes as vintage chic, but, really, they’re just old ordinary. I do have a hat that belonged to my grandmother, its wide brim now more yellow than the original cream. Also a darling if impractical little black Kate Spade purse I discovered on a junking expedition with Cousin Gail. My best find ever is a [...]

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Capital London

Sebastian Faulks’ canvas is so vast in his new novel A Week in December that I found myself on page 39, on the London Underground, one of  the “tourists with their wheeled luggage and their rucksacks. They chattered as they pored over guidebooks, glanced up at the Tube map overhead, trying to reconcile the two. [...]

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