I ONCE read in an astrological magazine that China, like a good many people I know, was under the sign of Pisces, which is conducive to sloth and a kind of easygoing indolence, and perhaps for this ...

This may be a dramatic epistolary cliché but it also encapsulates a fascinating truth about the act of letter writing itself. A writer and a reader talk, but in a lonely sort of conversation, long ...