A Vanished Hand: My Autograph Album is a postscript to Anthony Rudolf's memoir of childhood, The Arithmetic of Memory (1999) and accompanies the newly published Silent Conversations: A Reader's Life. The autograph album, testimony to Rudolf's teenage years, was presumed lost for thirty years until it emerged, energies intact, beneath a pile of books in the author's loft. Describing the circumstances of each autograph, he is led down unexpected trails, such as a visit to Bushey Jewish Cemetery, where he explores the wording on Alma Cogan's tombstone, only a few yards from that of the author's...

Journey Around My Flat is the fourth in a series of five memoirs. Previous volumes are The Arithmetic of Memory (on growing up in Hampstead Garden Suburb), Silent Conversations (where the author draws on the books in his library to generate thoughts about reading and re-reading) and A Vanished Hand (a short illustrated account of his long-lost autograph album from the 1950s). The final volume is a work-in-progress: In the Picture: Office Hours at the Studio of Paula Rego, an account of the author's ongoing close association with the painter since the two first met in 1996. Journey Around My...