He and his best-known work Voyage Around My Room (first published in 1794) are enjoying fresh limelight. That is because Voyage Around My Room has been getting a guernsey on so many of those lists of recommended pertinent, pandemic reading recommended by the bookish, to the bookish. And so, usually, Voyage Around My Room is there on those lists cheek-by-jowl with Daniel Defoe's wonderful Robinson Crusoe, a saga of a castaway's extreme isolation, quarantined by fate, on a remote island.

Voyage gets its topical, pandemic-reading-list guernsey because, with millions of the world's people pandemic-sequestered at home, it is de Maistre's imagination-embellished piece based on his experience of being stuck at home, sentenced to six weeks' house-arrest for duelling.

The little book's qualities are indescribable but an admiring Alain de Botton sums it up, saying that with it: "De Maistre pioneered a mode of travel that was to make his name: room travel.

"Dressed in pink-and-blue pyjamas, satisfied within the confines of his own bedroom, Xavier de Maistre was gently nudging us to try, before taking off for distant hemispheres, to notice what we have already seen [but have yet to pay proper attention to]."

And so in de Maistre's mind every object in the room, its furnishings, artworks, fixtures, decorations, becomes a kind of deserving tourist magnet.

In these times when we are trendily urged to embrace "mindfulness" and "living in the moment", de Maistre's masterpiece is a kind of manual of how to do those things.

So for example, his room's several framed pictures become important to him as he goes up to them, studies them intently and in a sense steps through their frames and into them.

Try this yourselves, readers.

With enough imagination, stepping into your print of Tom Roberts' masterpiece Bailed Up, you'll suddenly find yourself in the hot, summer, Victorian bush. Tread softly lest your footsteps noisily crackle the brittle fallen gum leaves and alert the bearded Ned Kellyish bushrangers and they turn their muskets on you and rob you of your credit card.

In my case the room most voyaged around is my study. What revelations! So for example, studying the pictures on the room's walls I find that of the seven of them five are views of my beloved, picturesque, seaside home town in England that I grew up in before, in the 1960s, the artful Menzies government lured me (God help me, I was only 18) by bribes to these Antipodes.

What do these Pommy pictures say? Is it that I am even more nostalgically England-embedded than I knew? Is this why one cared so much, from 19,000 kilometres away, about the tragedy of Brexit.

The other two pictures in the room are photographs of a Melburnian grandson I am estranged from (for who knows how long?) by the twin tyrannies of pestilence and distance.

For now, in fortunate Canberra, discreet and careful voyages beyond our rooms are still possible. In a recent, never-to-be-forgotten column I looked at the joys of solitary walking, an activity being much discovered/much rediscovered in these viral times when mingling with others is fraught and forbidden.

And on one very recent twilight ramble with my dog in one of those spacious Canberra lakeside parks twice the size the size of Luxembourg, we saw a hare.

Eerily, coincidentally, only the day before up had popped in my online London Review of Books a hymn of praise to hares, Katherine Rundell's Consider The Hare.

In the early ACT hares were numerous. Now, though, they are so relatively scarce and mostly so unobtrusively solitary and largely nocturnal that to see one seems, when one has a talent for gratitude, a privilege. My dear dog Voss and I both gave gasps of appreciation at seeing the hare giving us its rapt attention.

"Even if you let me off the leash I wouldn't bother to chase it," Voss reflected.

"Do you know they can run at 80 kilometres an hour and leap three metres, five times their own length in a single bound? It would be as humiliating for me to try to chase a hare as it would be for you to try to play tennis against Roger Federer."

Hares have a hard-to-capture charisma that Katherine Rundell has a good try at capturing.

"Hares have always been thought magical," she reminds us.

"In their long-limbed quivering beauty, they were believed to be walking, breathing love potions. Part of the hare's magic was in the belief that it was hermaphrodite, a switcher-at-will, sometimes male, sometimes female. A clay pot from 500 BC shows a man offering a live hare to a younger man. It was a thing to conjure love, both heterosexual and homosexual."

"If beauty is enough to merit love," Katherine Rundell marvels, "then we should love the hare more than almost any other creature."

"The closer you get, the more beautiful they become. Their legs have the grandeur of Olympians' and their ears, black-tipped, lined in pink velvet are semi-translucent in the light ... If there is magic in this world, some part of it lies with them."

Grateful that we had been given this glimpse of some of the world's very-scarce-at-the-moment magic, Voss and I went home, to resume our voyages towards our small rooms' far horizons.