21 September 2002

Dear Mary… Q. A neighbour – an eminent retired politician, philanthropist and keen ornithologist – has just acquired an owl whistle, beautifully crafted from wood. When blown, it makes a most realistic toowooo. He related to me, a few days ago, that the previous evening he had tried it out for the first time at

This month marks the birthday, in 1880, of the great American polemicist H.L. Mencken. Mencken was born in Baltimore, and in the 1920s and 1930s was the most feared and admired writer in the United States. He spared no one his caustic honesty; politicians, church leaders, academics, quack doctors, puritans, fanatics and other species he