"How are you doing?" the nurses would ask me in melancholy tones ( Read more... )

Some people cannot be taken with you. They walk beside you, and then you can go no further - then they are no more than scenery, and you must leave them there, in the past, behind you. Standing before the bed, I tidied her clothes, combed her hair straight. Goodbye, Hua Hua. And I thought I saw the thin slip of her soul, passing through the gap in ( Read more... )

"The man I was going to marry was killed on a bombing mission during the war. I met Jimmy dancing. I was 19 and he was 21. But then he was posted. He used to write every day and tell me where he'd been on his missions. Then one day I got a letter from his mother telling me that he was missing - his plane had been shot down. All of them were killed ( Read more... )

Advice from the great Noël Coward, in the form of an invaluable letter he sent to his good friend, Marlene Dietrich, in 1956.

(Source: The Letters of Noël Coward)

Firefly Hill
Port Maria
Jamaica B.W.I.

Oh, darling,

Your letter filled me with such a lot of emotions, the predominant one being rage that you should allow yourself to be so humiliated and made ( Read more... )

Charles Dickens' marriage with Catherine Hogarth was a notoriously unhappy one. After she had ten of his children, he left her for a much younger mistress.

This poignant letter was written three weeks into his engagement to Catherine, in May 1835, and shows that, even then, he had doubts about their compatibility. It is not an obviously romantic ( Read more... )