My cover for Barbara Pyms beautiful novel Quartet in Autumn.

In 1970s London Edwin, Norman, Letty and Marcia work in the same office and suffer the same problem - loneliness. Lovingly and with delightful humour, Pym conducts us through their day-to-day existence: their preoccupations, their irritations, their judgements, and - perhaps most keenly felt - their worries about having somehow missed out on life as post-war Britain shifted around them

Summer cover for London Review of Books

When I was 10 years old I had a pet hamster called Fluffy.

One of the joys of owning a hamster in the 1990s was the exciting new range of hamster cages, with plastic domed compartments and expandable tube systems to collect and assemble.

Every weekend I would rearrange Fluffy’s cage into increasingly elaborate constructions resembling miniature moon bases or futuristic theme parks, before returning him to shuffle, disoriented, around his new environment.

One Saturday I decided to give Fluffy a “penthouse suite,” by placing his bedroom compartment at the very top of a long series of plastic tubes, and I watched him sleepily shuffle his way up to his nest.

I imagined him waking up in the morning and pressing his face to the plastic wall of the compartment, gazing out at a spectacular view across my bedroom, but instead when I woke I found his lifeless little body crumpled at the bottom of the tube.

I never quite forgave myself.

Published on The New York Times My Childhood Pet feature

NYTimes Illustration from last Sunday
How Therapists Mourn by Robin Weiss

Some post-Christmas Illustrations in The Washington Post