He wrote tenderly of his wife, Lily, a neighborhood activist; she died in 1996 and later a playground in Washington Heights was named for her.

Diski cites Nabokov as an influence, and her own tangle with remembered time is distinctly Nabokovian - as are her mix of passion and detachment and her ability to write tenderly while retaining a cool unsentimentality about herself and others.

Others are more explicit and unhesitatingly propose Martindale's lesbianism, referring for instance to her 1951 autobiography A Woman Surgeon, in which she writes quite openly and tenderly (though without giving explicit detail) about her love for FitzGerald.

Although the letters Kearny wrote to Agnes tenderly avow his love for her and their children and wistfully recall Bellegrove, they emit the same sparks of defiance that characterized his military style to the day of his death at Chantilly, Va.

He writes tenderly of John Cage, his collaborator and life partner, "sitting (like an old gnome) in the front row of the theater, hands crossed (do they ache?)

He writes tenderly about fig trees and nightingales, frescoes and stained glass, and particularly about the lovely light of the area: "The experience of it was like the experience of understanding something."

The true test: he writes tenderly, reverently, about old women.

His stories were mostly ridiculous comic observations of working-class city life, though he could write tenderly and observantly, especially on Irish subjects.

What Day wrote tenderly, was belted out with contradictory ferocity.

Everything is loosely knitted together by Noel Alexandre, who also writes tenderly if predictably about the drawings and seems to have inherited his father's intense and uncritical admiration.