Blog | Slightly Foxed

“An impish … irreverent writer of genius” – Guardian

Rosemary Sutcliff (1920‒92) wrote three of her four great historical novels for children set during the last years of the Roman occupation of Britain – The Eagle of the Ninth, The Silver Branch and The Lantern Bearers (winner of the Carnegie Medal) – between 1954 and 1959, and the fourth, Frontier Wolf, which comes third in the chronological story, in 1980. The four books are only loosely interconnected, but together they give a vivid picture of the ebbing away of imperial power from Britain as Rome’s values were undermined and her defences gradually weakened by Saxon invasions … Though most of her books were written primarily for children, the flesh-and-blood reality of her characters, her convincing plots and her brilliant reimagining of everyday life in a remote and mysterious Britain have always attracted adult readers too. Slightly Foxed is now reissuing all four of the Roman novels, with their original illustrations, in a limited, numbered edition …

25 Feb 2021

‘A great present for those who love books’ Financial Times

A subscription to Slightly Foxed magazine or our limited edition books would make an ideal present for those who love to read. | Browse and buy gift subscriptions | From £44

Episode 30: Jim Ede’s Way of Life

The Slightly Foxed Podcast

In this twentieth-century story of a quest for beauty, the writer Laura Freeman introduces us to Jim Ede, a man who, in creating Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, changed the way we look at art. We follow Jim from the trenches of the First World War to Lady Ottoline Morrell’s literary parties in Bloomsbury and a curating job at the Tate. He collected artworks by his friends Ben Nicholson and David Jones, acquired the estate of the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and designed a house in Tangiers that became a sanctuary for soldiers. These were stepping stones towards Jim turning derelict slum cottages into a home and gallery, a space for both tea and tours. And, as ever, we share recommendations for reading off the beaten track.

Q is for Quiller-Couch, Arthur | From the Slightly Foxed archives

Our series of recommendations for good reading via the magazine’s archives has brought us to a letter of the alphabet we thought could prove troublesome. However, all fears have been eased as it offers up a writer Daphne du Maurier ‘admired among all others’, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, whose works were published under the pseudonym ‘Q’. Du Maurier was far from Q’s only admirer. Helene Hanff enjoyed a volume of lectures by Quiller-Couch, and was inspired to seek out all the titles he recommended. This led to a correspondence with an antiquarian bookshop in London that lasted many years, and these letters became the beloved 84, Charing Cross Road. Helene pays her debt to her reading mentor in a subsequent memoir, Q’s Legacy. Derek Parker states his own case for Q’s legacy in this piece from Slightly Foxed Issue 21. Please find a link to read the full article below. We do hope you’ll enjoy it.

The Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2021

The Biographers’ Club is now accepting submissions for The Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2021. This year’s judges are Susannah Clapp, Horatio Clare and John de Falbe.

Slightly Foxed Editors’ Diary • 26 March 2021

Anna Kirk & Gail Pirkis

Spring has arrived, and with it the delivery to the office of our new Spring issue, the latest SF Edition, Laurie Lee’s As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, and the fifth in our series of Rosemary Sutcliff’s novels, Dawn Wind. Ahead of each delivery, we pore over spreadsheets, worry about stock levels, map out square feet and available bookshelf space, flick through fat folders of pre-orders and discuss quantities over the phone with Tracey at Smith Settle, our printers. And then the great day dawns . . .

P is for Portis, Charles | From the Slightly Foxed archives

Greetings from Hoxton Square where we’ve travelled through the magazine’s archives and landed in the Wild West to provide some gripping weekend reading. Christopher Rush’s piece on the ‘incredible and enthralling adventures’ of True Grit by Charles Portis appeared in Slightly Foxed Issue 39. Please find a link to read the full article below. We do hope you’ll enjoy it.

Episode 29: A Poet’s Haven

The Slightly Foxed Podcast

The artist Barrie Cooke had fishing in common with Ted Hughes, and mud and art in common with Seamus Heaney. Dr Mark Wormald, a scholar on the life and writings of Ted Hughes, has brought to light an extraordinary haul of poems, letters and drawings documenting a decades-long triangular friendship and a shared love of poetry and nature. He describes the spine-tingling discovery of Barrie’s cardboard box stuffed with correspondence and traces its history, starting with the first supper at Barrie’s Kilkenny home, and then at Jerpoint, also on the River Nore, where the trio forged their friendship, Seamus began Station Island and a poet’s haven flourished. From Ted’s dream of a burning fox man, climbing into Carrowkeel passage tombs and visits from Robert Lowell and Tom Paulin to fishing diaries, pike spoons and a stuffed trout, subsurface treasures are dredged up as our literary sifting takes us off the beaten track.

Dawn Wind | Light in the Dark Ages

‘In Dawn Wind, the fifth of her novels on Roman and post-Roman Britain, Rosemary Sutcliff is, as always, bang on the money . . .’ So writes Sue Gaisford in her article on the latest addition to our Slightly Foxed Cubs series of classic children’s books, and we couldn’t agree more. We’re delighted to have published Rosemary Sutcliff’s Dawn Wind this month and, for those of you who have placed orders for this title, it will be with you very soon, if not already. Though most of her books were written primarily for children, the flesh-and-blood reality of Rosemary Sutcliff’s characters, her convincing plots and her brilliant reimagining of everyday life in a remote and mysterious Britain have always attracted adult readers too. Dawn Wind is no exception. Within its opening pages we’re introduced to Owain, the book’s teenage hero who has both Roman and British blood in his veins, and learn that he is the sole survivor of a terrible battle with the Saxons. We do hope you’ll enjoy this latest offering, whether you’re a young reader or simply young at heart.

Heather Clark wins The Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2020 for Red Comet

We are delighted to announce that the winner of the Biographers’ Club Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2020 is Heather Clark for Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath.

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

‘I could go anywhere I liked in the world. There was nothing to stop me, I would be penniless, free and could just pack up and walk away.’

Introducing the latest addition to the Slightly Foxed Editions list, No. 54: As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. When Laurie Lee set out on foot from his home in the Gloucestershire village of Slad one midsummer morning in 1935 he knew he was saying farewell to the idyllic country boyhood that he would later capture so unforgettably in Cider with Rosie. He was 19 and off to see the world with only his violin for company. He was aiming for London but decided to go via Southampton because he had never seen the sea. And so began a year of wandering that would take him from the north of Spain south to the Mediterranean.

Bookshop of the Quarter: Spring 2021

The White Horse Bookshop is a proudly independent bookshop in a renovated Tudor townhouse in Marlborough, Wiltshire. Although their doors are closed to the public for the moment, the bookshop is very much open for business through their recently updated website. Wearing a smart new look for spring, it’s replete with recommendations, highlights and new books lists for customers’ online browsing pleasure. The booksellers are in full swing orchestrating click and collect and postal order services. A trip to Wiltshire to browse this beautiful bookshop in person is high on our list of bookish destinations to visit when we can. In the meantime, it was a pleasure to speak to bookseller Angus to learn more about life at White Horse Books.

Cover Artist: Slightly Foxed Issue 69, Niki Bowers, ‘“Spring Green” Tulips’

Niki Bowers trained and worked for many years as a graphic designer, later turning to printmaking. Using traditional methods, linocut prints are made from multiple blocks, hand-cut and printed in limited editions. These original prints reflect the landscape and wildlife…

Shelving My Assumptions

Ursula Buchan on volunteering in a local public library

Last year, in response to a public consultation on the viability of my local public library, I offered to volunteer my unskilled services every Friday afternoon. This was my small way of signalling to the county council how precious a resource I believed the library to be, even if I hadn’t visited it that often since my children left school. (I would need three lifetimes to read the books already residing on my own shelves.) The library is situated in a reasonably, but not excessively, prosperous small town, with a mixed-age population; like a thousand others across the country, I guess. I was gratefully welcomed by the professional librarians and set to work putting returned books back in their proper place on the shelves.

Making a Meal of It

Ysenda Maxtone Graham on Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine

Plot: towards lunchtime, a male employee in a large corporate office building (the first-person narrator) discovers that the shoelace of his left shoe has snapped precisely twenty-eight hours after the right one snapped: a thought-provoking coincidence. Clutching his Penguin copy of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations and pausing first for a pee in the men’s room, he descends the escalator to buy a bag of popcorn, a hot-dog, a cookie, a carton of milk and a new pair of shoelaces. Then he goes back up the escalator to his office, carrying his small bags. That’s it.

1 Mar 2021

The Great Self-Examiner

Anthony Wells on the essays of Michel de Montaigne

Can anyone reconcile us with death?

Michel de Montaigne, one of the great sages of the Renaissance, tried his best; and he was trying to reconcile himself as much as any readers he might have. ‘We must always be booted and ready to go,’ he writes in an early essay. To be ready we need to familiarize our- selves with this final destination. ‘So,’ he tells us, ‘I have formed the habit of having death continually present, not merely in my imagination, but in my mouth . . . He who would teach men to die would teach them to live.’

Bruised, Shocked, but Elated

Selina Hastings on Sybille Bedford, A Visit to Don Otavio

I first met Sybille Bedford in London in the early 1980s when an old friend of mine, Patrick Woodcock, who at the time was Sybille’s doctor, invited us both to dinner. As a keen admirer of Sybille’s writing, I was thrilled at the prospect.

Walking for the Sun and the Wind

Chris Saunders on Stephen Graham, The Gentle Art of Tramping

I think we can all agree on the restorative qualities of a country walk. Certainly, since I moved to Sussex, I have come to value walking as much more than a basic mode of transport, surrounded as I am by the tranquillity of fields, footpaths and woods. I only wish I could convince my daughter of the splendours on our doorstep.

A Kind of Cosmic Refugee

Nigel Andrew on the novels of Julia Strachey

Julia Strachey was a writer of rare talent and originality who, in a lifetime of writing, managed to complete and publish only two novels and a number of sketches and short stories. I knew nothing of her until I happened to come across a Penguin reprint of those novels, Cheerful Weather for the Wedding and An Integrated Man. I was immediately bowled over by their brilliance and originality, and was surprised to discover that, in effect, they are all there is. What stopped this gifted writer from finishing and publishing more?

Light in the Dark Ages

Sue Gaisford on Rosemary Sutcliff, Dawn Wind

Nobody likes losing a pet. But for Owain it is the very last straw. His father and his older brother were killed in the last great battle against the invading Saxons, a battle which he himself barely survived; he gave up his own freedom and became enslaved, to save the life of a sick girl he had befriended; his country, his home and his own family have been either overrun or destroyed and now Dog, his only friend, has been cruelly, pointlessly killed. Who could blame him for feeling suicidal?

Judgement Day

C. J. Driver on J. L. Carr, A Month in the Country

After a lifetime of teaching English literature, I have accumulated a private and rather eclectic pantheon of great (mainly modern) novels, in which J. L. Carr’s A Month in the Country holds a central place. Carr finished it in 1978, and it was published in 1980 by the Harvester Press, and then by Penguin in paperback. The novel received more acclaim in America than in Britain, although it did make the shortlist for the Booker Prize, where it lost out to one of William Golding’s less successful novels. In due course, as was Carr’s wont – because he thought little of most commercial publishers – he bought back the rights and published it under his own imprint of the Quince Tree Press, from which (blessedly) copies are still available (as are Carr’s seven other novels).

Thank You, Dr Spock

Alice Jolly on Benjamin Spock, Dr Spock’s Baby and Child Care

A night in the autumn of 2002. I am woken by a scream which threatens to blow the chimneys off the house. I rush into the next room, pick up my 3-month-old son and do my best to comfort him. His tiny face is purple and he’s thrashing and writhing in pain. My husband is away on a business trip. What can I do? I have no idea.

1 Mar 2021

Love at First Sight

Charles Hebbert on the novels of Antal Szerb

At a loose end after university in the 1980s I went to Budapest to learn Hungarian. My teacher gave our group a Hungarian novel from which we studied passages in class. It was a slim book with an enticing cover photograph of the Bridge of Sighs and an intriguing title: Utas és holdvilág – literally, ‘Traveller and Moonlight’.

Torrington’s Tours

Roger Hudson on the diaries of John Byng, Lord Torrington

The Great North Road, the A1, bypasses the villages that used to punctuate it and so misses out on the inns where John Byng, Lord Torrington, regularly used to stay on his touring holidays during the 1780s and ’90s. I have driven along it from London to Newark and back again far too often and am grateful to him for helping me relieve the boredom by recalling his experiences at the Sun in Biggleswade, the George at Buckden (good cream there, and a political barber), the Wheatsheaf on Alconbury Hill, or the Haycock on the Nene at Wandsford. They are recorded in the travel journals of this retired Colonel of the Foot Guards – he was only the 5th Viscount Torrington for the last few weeks of his life after his elder brother died in 1812 without an heir.

1 Mar 2021

Murder and Walnut Cake

Julie Welch on Hazel Holt’s Mrs Malory crime novels

‘For my son Tom. Since it was a vain attempt to match his prodigious literary output that got me into this situation in the first place.’

This slightly gushy (and therefore untypical) dedication at the front of Mrs Malory Wonders Why was the first clue I had as to how and why Hazel Holt created Sheila Malory. Thank goodness she did. Her stories about a middle-aged widow who solves murder mysteries saw me through a month in 2017 when two of my sons, simultaneously and both on the other side of the world, were seriously ill. Similarly, in March 2020 when it became clear that a pandemic was unavoidable and we had better hunker down or perish, I hunted out my store of Mrs Malories again. Everyone has an author whose work they turn to when it seems like the end of the world as we know it, and Hazel Holt is mine. She is something of a mystery herself, though.

1 Mar 2021

The Nightmare of Room 101

Christopher Rush on George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.

That first arresting sentence of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four transports us immediately into a world that is real enough (the swirl of gritty dust, the acidic sickly gin, the smell of boiled cabbage) but is also alien and fantastic. Even now, in the age of the 24-hour clock, that number thirteen startles you, for no clock ever does physically strike thirteen, and its undercurrent of unluckiness adds to the sense of unease. It’s one of the best opening sentences I’ve ever read.

Lyndon B. Johnson, Dad and Me

Andy Merrills on Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson

In the end, it was no surprise that I turned to books in the aftermath of my father’s death; as much as anything else, a love of reading, and a confidence in the calming power of the written word, was one of the many things that he gave me. What was more unexpected was the identity of the book that offered the greatest solace.

Growing Pains

Martin Sorrell on Fred Uhlman, Reunion

An annual pre-Christmas treat for me is discovering which books have impressed the great and the good of the literary world over the previous twelve months. The lists in the heavyweight papers invariably give me two or three ideas for spending the book tokens I know are coming my way. One year Ian McEwan praised John Williams’s Stoner, which I found so strong that I didn’t hesitate a few years later to follow up another of McEwan’s recommendations, the more so as he wasn’t alone in picking it. At least two other contributors had been struck by Reunion, a novella of under a hundred pages written by Fred Uhlman, a German-Jewish painter and writer. When it was first published in 1971 Reunion went unnoticed; and though it was a little more successful when reissued a few years later, it wasn’t until a further reissue in 2015 that it was recognized as the masterpiece it is.

1 Mar 2021

Slightly Foxed Editors’ Diary • 19 February 2021

Gail Pirkis & Anna Kirk

Although I’m not seeing Hattie and Jess in person at the moment (we’re in the office one at a time for now), we’re making our presence known to each other, leaving books we’ve enjoyed on desks to be discovered the next morning. Sometimes a bag of crisps or bar of chocolate accompanies the book, or, during an especially frantic week, a bottle of wine, but the books are the main thing. A peril – and perk – of ordering in books for subscribers is that we inevitably order some for ourselves. Just a couple of recent book swaps have included In the Kitchen, a collection of food-writing recommended by Jess and delicious to dip into, and Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat, an unusual and beautiful book I felt compelled to press upon the others and then include in our forthcoming Spring Readers’ Catalogue.

Pocket-sized and elegantly produced | Slightly Foxed Paperbacks

Our popular Slightly Foxed Paperbacks are perfect for slotting into a coat pocket or bag, and make charming presents. Delightful to look at, pocket-sized and elegantly produced on good cream paper, complete with French flaps, these reissues give you a chance to acquire some of the original hardbacks you may have missed. We’re providing some special offers when buying multiples of these perfectly pocketable paperbacks, so whether you’re in need of a good book or a present for someone you’re fond of, do seize the chance to stock up now.

Episode 28: An Odyssey through the Classics

The Slightly Foxed Podcast

Daisy Dunn, historian and biographer of Catullus and Pliny, sets our scene in ancient Rome and Greece, entertaining the Slightly Foxed team with literature of love and war, satire and myth, and amplifying echoes of the classics through the ages. We begin with Homer’s monsters and memorials of fallen men, then take a tour of the ancient world, from Catullus’ erotic poetry and Lysistrata’s sex strike to the eruption of Vesuvius and Suetonius’ lives of extraordinary emperors. In a more contemporary turn, F. Scott Fitzgerald borrows Gatsby from the Satyricon, and Mary Renault writes historical novels and lovers’ names in wine. And there’s the usual round-up of recommended reading from off the beaten track.

Before the Slaughter

Justin Marozzi on Laurie Lee, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

How much we miss movement in our suddenly still, stay-at-home pandemic era. Gone the footloose and fancy-free travel of our rose tinted imaginations, replaced by domestic gloom, pessimistic prospects and shrinking horizons. There seems something pleasingly necessary, then, about revisiting one of the great literary road trips, which celebrates movement for the sake of it and revels in youthful, devil-may-care vagabondism in a Europe basking in its last years of peace.

The Pram in the Hall

Laura Freeman on Barbara Hepworth, A Pictorial Autobiography

I lent my copy of Barbara Hepworth’s A Pictorial Autobiography to an illustrator friend who, for reasons of distance and diaries, I rarely see. We had been talking about children and creativity and whether one must necessarily restrict the other: the easel, the laptop, the pram in the hall. I said she must read Hepworth and posted her my copy. It arrived. She thanked me. After that: nothing. Nothing for months and months and a year, and for months after that. I nursed a perverse and very British grievance. I couldn’t possibly ask for it back, because that would be rude. Instead, I did the proper and polite thing of raining resentment, curses and hellfire on her head every time my eye caught the gap in the bookcase.

Slightly Foxed Issue 69: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

How cheering it is to see that there are signs of spring now both in the air and in the step of the people walking along Old Street and in the little streets around Hoxton Square. It feels as if Londoners are tentatively starting to pick up the threads of their lives again. As we’ve reported before, life in the Slightly Foxed office has not in fact been so very different during this last extraordinary year, except perhaps that we’ve been busier than usual – support from you for which we’ll be forever grateful. Anna, Hattie and Jess have been brilliant at keeping the show on the road, whatever the restrictions, and now Jennie is back with us from maternity leave – another reason to be cheerful.

O is for Origo, Iris | From the Slightly Foxed archives

Greetings from Slightly Foxed HQ where we thought it high time to continue our tour through the magazine’s archives and provide a free article – and a handful of book recommendations – for some weekend reading. Daniel Worsley’s piece on The Merchant of Prato by Iris Origo appeared in SF Issue 66 and, for those of you who crave a change of scene, takes us back to fourteenth-century Tuscany. Please find a link to read the full article below. We do hope you’ll enjoy it.

Marrying Out | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

We’ve been tidying the bookshelves to make room for our new spring publications and, lo and behold, we’re down to the last copies of our handsome limited edition of Marrying Out, Harold Carlton’s brilliantly observed, irresistibly hilarious memoir. If you’ve been thinking about adding this delightful book to your collection, now’s the time. Please read on for an extract, introduced by Oliver Pritchett.

The Torrington Diaries

Roger Hudson, An Appendix to Lord Torrington’s Diaries

There wasn’t space to include all the intriguing background information provided by Roger Hudson for his piece on ‘Torrington’s Tours’ which appeared in Issue 69. So we thought we’d share it here with any readers as fascinated as we were by the life and character of the eccentric and aristocratic author of the diaries, John Byng, Lord Torrington, and his tours through the English countryside during the 1780s and ’90s.

Slightly Foxed Editors’ Diary • 22 January 2021

Gail Pirkis & Steph Allen

Lovely though Christmas is, I must admit I also enjoy January. There’s something very satisfying about taking down the Christmas tree, tidying the house, finishing all the leftovers in the larder, putting up a calendar for the new year, opening a fresh diary and generally taking stock before spring arrives. This year, during our third lockdown, these small routines seem more important than ever. There’s an austere beauty too in the winter landscape. The sheep have cropped the grass to reveal every dip and curve in the land, the bracken has died back and the trees, now without even their tattered autumn leaves, have become living sculptures of twisted branches reaching into the sky. The winter light, low as dusk approaches, transforms the landscape and spotlights here a ridge, there a cleft in the valley.

Episode 27: Dr Wiener’s Library

The Slightly Foxed Podcast

Anthony Wells worked at The Wiener Holocaust Library in London for a decade. In this episode he leads the Slightly Foxed editors into the history of the library, which holds one of the most extensive archives on the Holocaust and the Nazi era. We travel to Germany, Amsterdam, New York and Tel Aviv, but it is people rather than places that the library remembers with its annals of personal stories. Dr Alfred Wiener, a German Jew who fought in the First World War, was one of the first to note the rise of the Nazi Party, and he began to assemble an archive of information in order to undermine their activities. From downfall by documentation in the Nuremberg Trial to a tracing service made up of millions of records, we learn how The Wiener Library ensures that those who disappeared are not forgotten.

The Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize Shortlist 2020

Slightly Foxed and The Biographers’ Club are delighted to announce the shortlist for the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2020.

A friendship conducted through books | Notes from Slightly Foxed

Greetings from all of us at Slightly Foxed. In light of the latest restrictions in the UK, we wanted to reassure you that we are able to safely dispatch books and goods. Please note that all orders will take a little longer to be dispatched than usual, and we are very grateful for your patience and continued support.

In the spirit of celebrating bookish correspondence, we wanted to draw your attention to one of our well-loved Plain Foxed Editions, 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff. The letters between Helene, a feisty, eccentric New York writer, and Frank Doel, a bookseller at Marks & Co. in London, reveal a growing friendship conducted through books.

Small World | From the Slightly Foxed archives

We’re continuing our travels through the archives, selecting an article for each letter of the alphabet that everyone can read on our website for free. In this piece from Slightly Foxed Issue 42, Michael Holroyd discovers Mary Norton’s The Borrowers in his ‘second childhood’.

Slightly Foxed Editors’ Diary • 22 December 2020

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

The first wave of Christmas cards has started to arrive: ‘Hope you’re staying safe’; ‘All quiet here – only one case in the village’. News of weddings postponed, of holidays cancelled, but also of new babies, of violin exams passed with distinction, of Zoom book groups and lockdown exercise sessions. The end of the kitchen table is piled with packs of Christmas cards still waiting to be sent, but this year there’s a terrible hitch. We can’t find our address book, which has our whole lives in it.

‘The funniest book I’ve read this year.’

The Tablet

‘Slightly Foxed is another brilliant imprint, publishing small hardback books from unfairly neglected authors. This year’s finest includes Christopher Robbins’ hilarious The Empress of Ireland, an account of the friendship between an English journalist and Brian Desmond Hurst, a flamboyant film director . . .’

Episode 26: A Winter’s Tale

The Slightly Foxed Podcast

In this seasonal episode, the Slightly Foxed team are guided through a snowstorm of winter writing over twelve centuries by the literary critic and author of Weatherland, Alexandra Harris. The tour takes us from Anglo-Saxon mead halls and monsters to Renaissance bodily humours, then on through cool, translucent Enlightenment weather into the dark cloud of the nineteenth century and beyond. We visit frost-fair carnivals on the frozen Thames with Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, brave the Brontës’ wild moorland, stay steamed up indoors with Jane Austen, sink into Dickens’s pea-soupers and see in the ‘year’s midnight’ with John Donne as we listen to a winter’s tale through literature.

‘Smashing little hardbacks’ | Slightly Foxed Editions

Greetings from Slightly Foxed. Parcels and packages are flying out of Hoxton Square to readers at a great rate and, whether they are presents for a fellow bibliophile or bookish gems that have caught your eye this season, we do hope they bring much literary cheer. There’s still time for us to help with gifts for booklovers, and we’d like to draw your attention to our Slightly Foxed Editions – beautifully produced pocket hardbacks, just the right size to hold in the hand and with a ribbon marker to keep your place. Perfectly designed to curl up with, these reissues of classic memoirs are highly individual and absorbing reads. And, if you have missed out on a title or two from our series of limited-editions, our Plain Editions come in the same neat pocket format as the original SF Editions and will happily fill any gaps in your collection – as well as forming a delightful uniform series of their own, bound in duck-egg blue cloth. For those of you in need of a good book, do seize the chance to stock up now. We hope you enjoy browsing our bookshelves.

Slightly Foxed Editors’ Diary • 27 November 2020

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

I’ve always loved the small room I work in. It’s snug and light and looks out into the branches of a big sycamore in the next-door garden. It’s felt like a haven, a place where I can shut the door, settle down and quietly get on with things. Until now, that is. The more lockdown continues and the more pressingly my little room demands my presence, the more hostile I feel to it. It’s like an old friend who’s suddenly become unreasonably demanding. That’s because it’s where my computer is and now most essentials of life seem to have gone online – food, clothes and present shopping, work meetings, events, doctor’s appointments, friendly drinks – it’s all become virtual.

Bookshop of the Quarter: Winter 2020

This year, more than ever, has shown how important it is to support and champion local and independent bookshops. Although a grand tour of bookshops might not be possible right now, we look forward to the day when we can rummage through bookshelves and buy recommended reading from convivial booksellers around the country. In the meantime, it is our great pleasure to head north to Edinburgh and pay a virtual visit to the latest bookshop in the Topping & Co family. Tilly from the shop has kindly provided us with a good dose of bookish sustenance. The shop is open for browsing to local readers, and we hope to explore the handcrafted bookcases in person when we can.

Cider with Rosie | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

‘Every single book Slightly Foxed publish is superb. (And beautifully made.) Just pluck at random from the catalogue and happiness is guaranteed.’ So declared a Foxed reader just the other day, and we’re delighted to add a new book to our list of cloth-bound pocket hardbacks this winter: SF Edition No. 53, Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee. Perfectly designed to curl up with, our reissues of classic memoirs are highly individual and absorbing reads, and the latest addition is no exception. Laurie Lee described this, his best-loved and best-known book, as ‘a recollection of early boyhood’, adding the acknowledgement that ‘some facts may have been distorted by time’. Whether or not they have, as one critic put it, ‘Cider with Rosie seems true as long as you’re reading it – and that’s the most important thing.’ It’s not just a rosy picture of a rural past, but a magical evocation of growing up in a lost world that rings emotionally true.

Episode 25: A Writer’s Territory

The Slightly Foxed Podcast

The Scottish nature writer Jim Crumley takes the Slightly Foxed team on a tour of literary landscapes, from the lochs of the Trossachs and the mountainous Cairngorms to Aldo Leopold’s sand county in Wisconsin and Barry Lopez’s Arctic. Together they trace the chain of writers who have influenced Jim, from Robert Burns and Wordsworth to Thoreau and Walt Whitman, and see nature through the eyes of his hero, the great Scottish naturalist and photographer Seton Gordon. They discuss how folklore has demonized the wolf while Jim believes its reintroduction could hugely benefit the ecology of the Scottish landscape. And finally they venture off the beaten track with this month’s wide-ranging reading recommendations.

Book Launch: An Englishman’s Commonplace Book

Despite everything that is going on in the world right now, a pair of Foxes scurried off to South West London on the rather dreary and wet evening of Wednesday 30 September 2020 to raise a glass with Roger and booksellers Johnny and Boojum at John Sandoe Books. It was an absolute joy to be able to celebrate Roger and the publication of An Englishman’s Commonplace Book at one of our favourite independent bookshops.

Slightly Foxed Issue 68: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

After probably the strangest year that most of us have ever experienced, London is starting to feel more familiar. There are lighted office windows around Hoxton Square, and there’s traffic again in Old Street, now including shoals of bikes, some darting in and out of the cars and vans like minnows, some wobbling dangerously. There are a lot of new and inexperienced bike riders in London these days, and whether you’re walking or driving you have to look out. At Slightly Foxed the office is buzzing, and readers and contributors have been active too, putting pen to paper, or rather finger to key, to give the two of us plenty to read after lockdown. Sadly we had to cancel Readers’ Day this year, but we’ve booked the Art Workers’ Guild for 6 November 2021, and we look forward very much to seeing you there.

The shocking story of Charles and Mary Lamb: Slightly Foxed podcast reviewed

Spectator

This story might have made for lurid telling, but the podcasters let James set it out plainly before interjecting with pertinent questions and steering the discussion to the Lambs’ work. The respectful quietness of Slightly Foxed is one of its virtues. Where other podcasts suffer from a crescendo of competing voices, this is steady and understated and, yes, all the cosier for being so.

Cover Artist: Slightly Foxed Issue 68, Coralie Bickford-Smith, ‘Winter’s Dance’

Coralie Bickford-Smith

Coralie Bickford-Smith is one of the most renowned designers in the publishing industry, especially recognized and celebrated for her illustrated covers of Penguin’s clothbound classics. Her first book, The Fox and the Star, was named Waterstones Book of the Year.…

Sprouts and Parsnip Wine | From the Slightly Foxed archives

Greetings from Slightly Foxed HQ. We’d like to reassure all our dear readers that we are dispatching books and goods safely during this time, so please do place orders as usual. Post is taking a little longer to arrive, both in the UK and overseas, but we endeavour to provide you with good reading as soon as possible. We are, as always, very grateful for your support. Speaking of good reading, and to bring some sunshine to this misty November day, we’re escaping to the countryside in the latest free article from the archive, and enjoying parsnip wine with Sarah Perry. Sarah’s article was published in Slightly Foxed Issue 58, and also appears as the preface to our edition of The Blue Field by John Moore. We do hope you’ll enjoy it.

Rosemary Sutcliff | The Lantern Bearers

We were delighted to publish two new titles in our Slightly Foxed Cubs series of highly collectable classic children’s books last month: Frontier Wolf and The Lantern Bearers by Rosemary Sutcliff. Sutcliff’s four great novels set during the last years of the Roman occupation of Britain, The Eagle of the Ninth, The Silver Branch, Frontier Wolf and The Lantern Bearers (winner of the 1959 Carnegie Prize), tell the story of several generations of the Aquila family, from the Empire’s glory days to its final withdrawal, weakened by increasing pressure from Saxon raiders and internal power struggles at home. Though most of her books were written primarily for children, the flesh-and-blood reality of her characters, her convincing plots and her brilliant reimagining of everyday life in a remote and mysterious Britain have always attracted adult readers too. They have been difficult to find for some time and we’re delighted to be reissuing them with their original illustrations.

These Old Bones

Dan Richards on writers’ totems

A few days before my birth my father returned from an Arctic expedition. He’d been away for several months on Svalbard – a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, halfway between continental Norway and the North Pole – exploring the glaciers, fjords and mountains east of Ny-Alesund, earth’s most northerly civilian settlement at 78° 55’ N. It was night and raining hard when he got back. From Svalbard he’d flown down to Tromsø, then Luton, then caught several trains and finally a bus to Penclawdd, a village in south Wales. My mother, sitting by the window, saw him walking up the shining road, pack on his back. Once home he was amazed to see how pregnant she was, how round her belly.

14 Nov 2020

Cheers!

Henry Jeffreys on Bernard DeVoto, The Hour & Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking

Sayre’s Law states: ‘In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake.’ I’ve noticed this in the world of booze. Some people take the question of whether a Martini should be shaken or stirred, or whether to put fruit in an Old Fashioned, very seriously. For a writer on the subject, there are two ways out of this bind: one is to take a bluff no-nonsense approach and admit that in the end it doesn’t really matter. The other is to take it so seriously that it verges on but doesn’t quite drop into ridiculousness. You can see the contrasting approaches in my two favourite writers on the subject, Kingsley Amis and Bernard DeVoto.

Poor Show

Peter Day on Alex Atkinson and Ronald Searle, The Big City

I must have bought The Big City soon after it was published in 1962, when Penguin was branching out from its then standard paperback format into slightly larger books with pictures, often cartoons. It cost me 4 shillings, and it is still on our shelves next to the bathroom, reserved for ‘rather special’ titles, to be revisited every few years with wonderment and nostalgia for a now-vanished post-war Britain.

Just the Way It Is

Posy Fallowfield on William Trevor, The Story of Lucy Gault

I first came across William Trevor in the early nineties when my son came home from school with The Children of Dynmouth, his GCSE set text. I’ve been an ardent fan ever since, although I must admit that in one’s robust forties Trevor’s themes (sadness, loneliness, cruelty, the sheer arbitrariness of life’s awfulness) can be relished in a way that becomes increasingly difficult with age, as one’s skin thins and that arbitrariness begins to bite.

The Magnetism of Murder

Alastair Glegg on Emlyn Williams, Beyond Belief & Dr Crippen’s Diary

In 1957 I was a schoolboy in what was then known as Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, when Arnold Jones, my English teacher, insisted that we all go with him to hear his compatriot, the Welsh author and actor Emlyn Williams, who was on tour with his one-man tribute to Dylan Thomas, A Boy Growing Up. This performance was a watershed in my appreciation of the spoken and written word. Williams held us spellbound for three hours: a small middle-aged, grey-haired man on a bare stage, bringing to life a child’s Christmas in Wales, making us laugh at Thomas’s self-portrait as a schoolboy drawing ‘a wild guess below the waist’, as a Young Dog with a beer bottle stuck on his finger, and then unexpectedly reducing us to pin-dropping silence with ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ and ‘Death shall have no dominion’. For me, this was the beginning of a lifetime’s enjoyment of the work not just of Dylan Thomas but of Emlyn Williams himself.

14 Nov 2020

Scaling Gibbon’s Everest

Richard Crockatt on Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788) must rank among the best known of unread or partly read books. At over 3,000 pages it is written in the sometimes convoluted style of the eighteenth century and lingers over details which mean little now to most readers, not least disputes over the nature of the Holy Trinity. Yet this Everest of a book asks to be scaled and in the end retirement offered me leisure and the necessary oxygen to make the attempt.

14 Nov 2020

Accentuating the Positive

Anthony Quinn on Molly Hughes, A London Child of the 1870s

According to my journal I first read Molly Hughes’s memoir A London Child of the 1870s in October 2005, ‘a record of Islington life so charming and droll I’m puzzled as to why I’d not come across it before’. I might not have come across it then either had my wife not given me a copy, just reissued by Persephone Books in its appealing dove-grey livery with William Morris endpapers. It was a perfect choice for someone obsessed by Victorian London in general and Victorian Islington in particular. To my delight the author and her family had lived at No. 1 Canonbury Park North, an address about five minutes’ walk from where I write this. Their house is no longer standing, though the references to Upper Street, Essex Road and Highbury New Park sound a welcoming refrain, and such is the peculiar immediacy of the writing that it takes no very great leap of imagination to see an organ-grinder on the pavement, or a child bowling a hoop, or a tram upon the Holloway Road.

Slightly Foxed Editors’ Diary • 23 October 2020

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

A Brief Pageant of English Verse

I won’t arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
I’ll sanitize the doorknob and make a cup of tea.
I won’t go down to the sea again; I won’t go out at all,
I’ll wander lonely as a cloud from the kitchen to the hall . . .

No Ribaldry Please, We’re British

Victoria Neumark on Francis Turner Palgrave, The Golden Treasury

Our family Bible came from our mum’s side. But our real missals were her poetry books – Come Hither, edited by Walter de la Mare, and The Golden Treasury, edited by Francis Turner Palgrave. Now I have these same books, and they are indeed full of treasure – not least, the pleasure of remembering shared readings, with special emphasis on wordplay and on the almost sensual pleasure of drenching ourselves in emotion.

14 Nov 2020

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Sam Leith on the short stories of Ray Bradbury

My dad turned me on to Ray Bradbury. The short stories had captivated him in his late teens and early twenties, and on his shelf was a two-volume Grafton paperback collection of them.

14 Nov 2020

A Merry Malady

Richard Platt on Holbrook Jackson, The Anatomy of Bibliomania

Let’s begin with a brief quiz. Have you ever arrived home, triumphant with glee over your latest bookshop find, only to discover that you already have the book you just purchased? Have you ever attempted to bring home unobserved a stack of newly purchased books, and thus avoid the censorious lift of the eyebrows of loved ones which so often greets your latest acquisitions? Have you ever begun reading a book you’ve been looking forward to for years, even decades, only to discover your own notes in the margins? (If so, you are a bibliolathas.) Are you on first-name terms with the staff of three bookshops or more? Have you ever had to reinforce a sagging floor because of the weight of your books? Have you ever had to add a room on to your home or move to a larger one to accommodate them?

Put That in Your Pipe . . .

Laurence Scott on Alfred Dunhill, The Pipe Book

One wouldn’t normally associate a book on pipes and pipe-smoking with deceit, guilt and posterior discomfort. This is how it happened. It was 1964. I was a scholastically challenged 14-year-old from north London who had just undergone double maths. Still dazed, I’d wandered off to the back of the bike sheds where I came across Howard Payne and his cronies furtively dispatching a packet of Gauloises.

The Thrillers You Keep

Frances Donnelly on Ross Macdonald, The Moving Target

Ink has been spilt debating when genre novels become literary fiction. My rule of thumb for recognizing the best in any genre is this: notice what books you keep, won’t lend and need to reread every few years. In detective fiction, for me, this means the books of Ross Macdonald, whose PI hero, Lew Archer, investigated murder and excess in post-war California.

14 Nov 2020

Strangely Prophetic

Anthony Longden on Simon Harcourt-Smith, The Last of Uptake

I always take particular pleasure in people’s stories about how they discover books. For me, the process is quite conventional, more often than not the result of a trip to the London Library, through word of mouth, via Slightly Foxed, or a profitable hour or two spent in a favourite second-hand bookshop. There is one exception in my experience, though: a discovery made thanks to a devastating fire at a country house.

A Lost Enchanted World

Charlotte Moore on Arthur Ransome, Old Peter’s Russian Tales

Not long ago, in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, I was transfixed by a vast oil painting; Viktor Vasnetsov’s Bogatyrs (Men of Power) – astride their horses, one brown, one black, one white. I felt a thrill of recognition. Here were the three brothers, born to a poor widow in a single night and named Evening, Midnight and Sunrise, ‘all three as strong as any of the strong men and mighty bogatyrs who have shaken this land of Russia with their tread’.

Life is the Thing

Adam Sisman on George Eliot, Middlemarch

Recently I decided to reread George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–2). Half a lifetime had passed since my first reading. I remembered how satisfying I had found the book then; now I wondered how I would find it thirty-five years later. Rereading a favourite book can be perilous. Whatever the poet says, one can never quite recapture that ‘first fine, careless rapture’. And of course I am not the same person today as I was then.

14 Nov 2020

Golden Fire

Kate Young on Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie

I write these words, appropriately enough, in The Woolpack – the Slad pub that once claimed Laurie Lee as its most famous patron – with a pint of cider at my elbow. From one window, the view dips down into a valley, and you can see a path that leads into Stroud, where Lee was born in 1914. From the other, the churchyard, where he is buried beneath the words ‘He lies in the valley he loved’, is just visible. The cider I am drinking is, inevitably, pressed from local apples: ‘golden fire, wine of wild orchids and of that valley and that time and of Rosie’s burning cheeks’. It feels, as it often does in The Woolpack, as if the connections with the past, those generations before me who called this place home, are tangible ones, worn into the dark, musty, cider-soaked fabric of the place.

Ring Out, Wild Bells!

Marianne Fisher on Jasper Snowdon, Diagrams

Imagine you are walking in the English countryside and come to a village. As the day is hot and the church is open, you step inside to look around and rest in the predictably cool and dim interior. There are some things that the vast majority of church buildings in the British Isles seem to share: the ‘odour of sanctity’ (a combination of furniture polish, lilies and slightly damp stonework); the kneelers stitched by parishioners; a wall display or prayer tree made by the Sunday-school children; and a series of polite little notices – ‘Please close the door. PIGEONS!!!’

Episode 24: The Lives and Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb

The Slightly Foxed Podcast

Dr Felicity James, author of Charles Lamb, Coleridge and Wordsworth: Reading Friendship in the 1790s and current custodian of Charles’s writing chair, introduces the Slightly Foxed editors to siblings at the heart of a literary circle. In their Tales from Shakespeare, gentle-hearted drunken-dog Charles wrote the tragedies and Mary, often chided for laughing, the comedies, and together they penned letters using different coloured inks. From a murder in the home and time in private asylums to conversations with Coleridge at the pub, dissertations on roast pig and salons in their London lodgings, we explore the lives of the Lambs and their friendships through books.

Slightly Foxed Issue 67: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

There’s a fox’s earth on the cover of this issue, but thanks in large part to you, this Fox has far from gone to earth. We’ve loved receiving your encouraging messages and emails during this difficult year, and you’ve pulled out all the stops with extra purchases, subscriptions and renewals. ‘I read Slightly Foxed in bed with my morning tea as an antidote to the news,’ writes N. Reifler. Now it’s autumn, and we’re happy to say that our publishing programme is up and running, with a great deal to look forward to.

A Slightly Foxed Special | An Englishman’s Commonplace Book

‘Variety, the unexpected, a bit of vulgarity and the ridiculous mixed in with the elevated,’ has been Roger Hudson’s recipe in compiling this commonplace book from material he’s gathered over the past 40 years. And that is what we are given in this wide-ranging collection by a well-read man with a sharp eye, an ironic – indeed very English – sense of humour and a devotion to history.

Slightly Foxed Editors’ Diary • 18 September 2020

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

Last Thursday was a red-letter day for me because it was that now rare thing, a real letter day. Among the catalogues, bills and offers to sell the house shoved through the letterbox was an envelope addressed in the distinctive handwriting of an old friend. For many years now, widowed and against all advice, she has lived alone in a slightly dilapidated house in a remote part of rural France, reading and rereading her favourite books, ruled over with an ‘iron paw’ by her dog and cat and subsisting on very little money. She sees a few local friends, but nowadays, she says, she tends more to reclusiveness, quoting Colin Dexter’s verdict on Inspector Morse: ‘He was somewhat of a loner by temperament – because though never wholly happy when he was alone he was usually slightly more miserable when with other people.’

Shepherds’ Lives | From the Slightly Foxed archives

Greetings from Hoxton Square where, following the dispatch of our autumn publications to readers around the world, our thoughts are beginning to turn to woolens, fireside nooks and making our way through the toppling piles of books we’ve selected from a bumper crop of recent titles. One of these books is James Rebanks’s new offering, English Pastoral, a history of the Lake District farm he inherited and how the land has changed over three generations. Reading of farm life in the northern fells prompted us to revisit Ursula Buchan’s article from Slightly Foxed Issue 53, which takes us back to James Rebanks’s first book, The Shepherd’s Life, and to W. H. Hudson’s A Shepherd’s Life, the book which ‘turned the young Rebanks into a reader’.

Episode 23: A Writer in the Kitchen

The Slightly Foxed Podcast

The food writer and chef Olivia Potts joins the Slightly Foxed editors for a literary banquet. Olivia was a barrister for five years before enrolling at Le Cordon Bleu, becoming a cookery columnist on The Spectator and writing A Half Baked Idea, a memoir with recipes. From finding consolation in cooking and precision in pâtisserie to nostalgia-soaked blancmange and family dinners in the Cazalet Chronicles, the conversation flows, welcoming Jane Grigson, Elizabeth David, Charles Dickens and the extraordinary Fanny Cradock to the table along the way. And in this month’s taste from the magazine’s archives, Rachel Khoo’s cookbook conjures up feasts in an attic in Paris.

Bookshop of the Quarter: Autumn 2020

Oxford is home to a host of literary greats, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, Lewis Carroll, Iris Murdoch and Philip Pullman to name a few. And, as of last month, it is home to a brand-new branch of Daunt Books, who bring their signature independent spirit, smart aesthetic and bookselling expertise to Oxford-based bibliophiles.

Cover Artist: Slightly Foxed Issue 67, Tor Falcon, ‘Fox’s Earth in Calveley Hall Wood’

Tor Falcon

Tor Falcon is an artist who walks and makes drawings on her journeys through the landscape. Past projects include the Peddars Way and the South Downs. Her most recent project, to follow, draw and write about the rivers of Norfolk, took four years to complete.

Delivering a Missing Letter

Kate Morgan on the crime novels of Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö

A disused bus shelter in the market town of Sedbergh is a curious place for a quest to end, literary or otherwise. The town itself is rather curious too; geographically in Cumbria but on the wrong side of the M6 to be in the Lake District proper, it sits almost exactly on the watershed where the rolling green fells give way to the harsher limestone uplands of the Yorkshire Dales. Hard up against the Howgill Fells, it has always attracted walkers but in recent years it has also become a haven for readers. It now has seven bookshops, including an enormous second-hand one at the end of the High Street, and bookshelves are squeezed into any available space in the town’s other shops and cafés. When we arrived for cake and a potter while holidaying in Hawes, it was more in hope than expectation that here we would find the missing piece to complete the Scandinavian puzzle that our dining-room bookshelf had become.

1 Sep 2020

Going Loco

Martin Sorrell on Ian Allan’s books for trainspotters

Recently, lingering in my loft over books and back numbers of this journal and that, I stumbled on a photo of some schoolboys, paper and pencils in hand, sitting on a fence and watching a train go by. The location was Tring; the date, 1933. It’s a safe bet that what those lads were jotting down was the number of the steam locomotive at the head of the express.

Coal, Rent and Chaos

Michael Leapman on Gwyn Thomas, A Frost on My Frolic

A couple of years ago the judges for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction decided that none of the sixty two books submitted was funny enough to win, so they withheld the award. One of them, the publisher David Campbell, explained: ‘Despite the submitted books producing many a wry smile amongst the panel during the judging process, we did not feel than any of the books we read this year incited the level of unanimous laughter we have come to expect.’ Humour is notoriously subjective, but I am confident that if the prize had existed sixty-seven years ago, Gwyn Thomas’s A Frost on My Frolic would have been a strong contender.

1 Sep 2020

An Irresistible Cad

Anthony Garder on Guy de Maupassant, Bel-Ami

Is it possible to love a book and hate it at the same time? That is the question that nags me whenever I think of Guy de Maupassant’s novel Bel-Ami (1885). It’s undoubtedly a masterpiece: the characterization is subtle, the social critique is incisive, the plot is completely absorbing. But its protagonist, nicknamed Bel-Ami because of his extraordinary good looks, is one of literature’s most despicable creations: a man who tramples on friend and foe alike – and above all on the women who love him – in his pursuit of wealth and status. With another writer, you might stomach such behaviour in the sure expectation of a spectacular come-uppance; but Maupassant’s amoral universe is one in which some people can get away with anything. What keeps us turning the pages is the brilliance of his writing and a fascination with how far his anti-hero can go.

1 Sep 2020

Mood Music

Laura Freeman on Rosamond Lehmann, Invitation to the Waltz

‘Dance after dance with an old fogey. Three running now, pressed to his paunch.’ Oh, the hell of parties! The small humiliations. The shy, smudged-mascara, wallflower-grief of it all. Where was Rollo? Archie? Tony? Even Reggie, dreaded Reggie, would do. In Rosamond Lehmann’s Invitation to the Waltz we share every agony, every spurning, every smallest saving grace with Olivia Curtis, just 17 and, as her dressmaker cheerfully tells her, ‘no bewtee’. We meet her on her birthday, staring into the bedroom mirror with a mix of adolescent pride and doubt. And such is Lehmann’s uncanny power that the reflection in the glass isn’t Olivia’s: it’s our own.

The Force of History

Tim Pears on Charles T. Powers, In the Memory of the Forest

‘My father once told me that our history is like a force behind us, pushing us along, unacknowledged or even unknown, but dictating the way we live our lives.’ In the Memory of the Forest by Charles T. Powers is set in a small Polish town fifty miles east of Warsaw in the early 1990s. Communism is being dismantled. Free-market capitalism lets rip.

1 Sep 2020

Blooming Marvellous

Polly Devlin on Darcy O’Brien, A Way of Life, Like Any Other

Sometime in the late 1990s, when I was staying in Dublin with my sister Marie Heaney and her husband Seamus, he was working on the introduction to a book called A Way of Life, Like Any Other, which I took to be a novel. I’d never heard of it, but the fact that Seamus was writing an introduction to this new edition seemed like an honour and signalled importance. First published in 1977, it had won both the Guardian Fiction Prize and the American PEN/Hemingway Award. How had I missed it?

1 Sep 2020

Branching Out

Hazel Wood on the Pimpernel Press

In keeping with its name, Pimpernel Press has put down its roots in an unassuming Victorian house hidden at the end of a pleasant street off West London’s Harrow Road. The only hint that a publisher is in residence is the pile of tempting-looking books glimpsed from the front doorstep through the ground-floor bay window. Pimpernel’s publisher, Jo Christian, squeezes past me in the narrow hall to usher me into her combined office and living-room, where a long table is covered with a comfortable clutter of laptop, proofs, interesting objects and framed photographs. Beneath a wall thick with prints and paintings a pair of life-sized Coade stone greyhounds – refugees perhaps from some great house or garden – stand next to a large old sofa covered in piles of books. We’re clearly a long way here from the world of corporate publishing.

Progression by Digression

Christian Tyler on Laurence Sterne, The Life of Tristram Shandy

In many ways The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is a maddening book. It is funny, of course, but also eccentric, anarchic and longwinded; and it’s hard to understand why it survived to become a classic. Perhaps these days only university students and professors read Tristram Shandy. But for two centuries it was a family favourite. My great-grandfather Walter Congreve discovered it while lying wounded in hospital during the Boer War. He carried it with him – alongside the Bible – through the First World War, to his military command in Palestine and thence to Malta as governor.

1 Sep 2020

Worse Things Happen at Sea

David Fleming on Walter Lord, A Night to Remember

Every child who enjoys reading will sooner or later begin to explore the world of grown-up books. The first ones I ever read were bought in an antique shop in the picturesque town of Cromarty on the Black Isle. I can’t recall my exact age or the year – about thirteen, around 1975 – but the second-hand paperbacks I found there and devoured over that three-week family holiday are very clear in my mind.

The Last of Rome

Sue Gaisford on Rosemary Sutcliff, Frontier Wolf & The Lantern Bearers

Desperation drove me to Horatius, one gloomy afternoon in late October. Thirty restless children were waiting to be entertained, educated or even just dissuaded from rioting by their hapless supply teacher. I gave them Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome – largely because my father’s recitation of ‘How Horatius Kept the Bridge’ had so grabbed and held my own attention, decades earlier. The drama of the thing still worked its magic: the bridge fell with a crash like thunder, whereupon ‘a long shout of triumph rose from the walls of Rome / As to the highest turret-tops was splashed the yellow foam’. My father would put gleeful stress on the word ‘yellow’. Then, of course, brave Horatius, fully armed and uttering a powerful prayer to Father Tiber, hurls himself into the turbulent river and makes it to the other shore.

Loafing by the Seine

Kristian Doyle on Julian Green, Paris

Sometimes, nostalgic for Paris, I read books about the city in the hope that through them I’ll know again the felt reality of daily life there. It never really works: books, after all, can only do so much. A rare few, though, come surprisingly close. Among them Paris, by Julian Green, first published in French in 1983, is the one I return to most often. It is also, for some reason, one of the least known.

1 Sep 2020

A Vanished Warmth

Robin Blake on Humphrey Jennings, Pandaemonium

At school I loved our history lessons. I spent hours drawing plans of castles and battles, and was a binge reader of historical fiction by anyone from Rosemary Sutcliff and Henry Treece to Mary Renault and Robert Graves. A little later I enjoyed exploring first-hand evidence from the past and I particularly remember some volumes in the school library called They Saw It Happen. The third of these English historical anthologies, covering the years 1689–1897, was especially well-known to us because it had been compiled by bufferish Mr Charles-Edwards and suede-shoed Mr Richardson from our very own History Department.

Giving Pain a Voice

Rose Baring on John Berger, A Fortunate Man

A lone doctor hares down a country lane in his Land Rover, his thumb jammed on the horn to warn the oncoming traffic that he’s not stopping. A woodman’s been pinned to the ground on a remote hillside by a falling tree and every second counts. Even at the start of A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor (1967), we are given an inkling of what makes Dr Sassall an exceptional GP. He had his thumb on the horn partly, he explains, so that the man under the tree might hear it and know he is on his way. Dr Sassall understands that even when the immediate danger is physical, his patients need him to keep their minds in mind. A good doctor treats the whole of his patient, not just his wounds.

An Obscure Form of Magic

Edmund Gordon on Henry Green, Party Going

I’ve just read Party Going (1939), Henry Green’s comic and melancholic masterpiece, for the third or fourth time, and I’m still not sure how to convey its complex flavour. It’s a fantastically busy and exuberant novel, in which nothing really happens. (The major events include: an old lady picking up a dead pigeon and subsequently feeling ill; a beautiful young woman having a bath; a servant getting a kiss from a stranger.) It’s at once so beautifully written that I want to quote the whole thing, and so eccentrically stylized that it isn’t easy to find a quotable line. (Green was intolerant of standard English grammar and syntax; witness for example his take-’em-or-leave-’em approach to articles, as in the novel’s bizarre opening sentence: ‘Fog was so dense, bird that had been disturbed went flat into a balustrade and slowly fell, dead, at her feet.’) It’s an effervescent comedy of manners, set almost exclusively among members of the English upper class – and yet its most remarkable quality is an anguished sense of human suffering.

Left, Left, Left

Selina Hastings on Jessica Mitford, Hons and Rebels

In the early 1980s I began working on my first book, a biography of Nancy Mitford. Four of the six Mitford sisters were then still living, Pamela in the Cotswolds, Diana in Paris with her second husband Sir Oswald Mosley, Debo, wife of the Duke of Devonshire, at Chatsworth, and Jessica, always known as ‘Decca’, with her family in California. Throughout my research Pam, Diana and Debo were immensely kind and helpful, all of them possessed of great charm and a slightly idiosyncratic sense of humour. They invited me to stay, gave me access to hundreds of letters, and mined for my benefit lucid memories of their early lives and of their family and friends.

A Separate World

Ian Thomson on Jaan Kross, The Czar’s Madman

When I think back to that first visit of mine to Estonia in 1988, I see muted, metallic-grey tones of fog and sea; above all I remember a sense of wonder that I was finally on my way to my mother’s homeland. Ingrid was 17 when, stateless and displaced, she arrived in England in 1947, having fled westwards from the Baltic ahead of Stalin’s advancing Red Army. She had not been back to her native land since. Now, half a century later, I was sailing to the Estonian capital of Tallinn from Helsinki – a three-hour journey by ferry across the Gulf of Finland. The Independent Magazine had asked me to report on Moscow’s waning power in the Soviet Baltic. A hammer and sickle flapped red from the ship’s stern as we set sail. The air was pungent with engine oil as I walked towards the stern and watched Helsinki’s Eastern Orthodox cathedral dwindle to a dot.

Slightly Foxed Editors’ Diary • 21 August 2020

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

It’s true that I’m writing this in Highbury, but mentally I’m in Suffolk. We came back yesterday from a week’s family holiday, and after months of being confined to London and seeing very little of our grandchildren, I’m finding it hard to make the transition. In my mind’s eye I’m still on the harbourside at Walberswick grasping the back of my 7-year-old grandson’s T-shirt as he crouches above the water, his small body tense with excitement as he strains over the edge to see if there’s anything in the net he’s dangling into the murky depths below. ‘Shall I pull it up now?’ ‘Well, wait a little bit, you’ve only just looked.’ ‘But there’s something in it. I know there is. I can see it!’ We peer down. Something seems to be moving, and yes! Oh joy! ‘Granny, it’s a crab! It’s huge. It’s gigantic. Quick, come and look!’

Episode 22: Independent Spirit

The Slightly Foxed Podcast

Small but discerning, choosing passion over fashion, Little Toller Books shares an independent spirit with Slightly Foxed. Jon Woolcott joins us from this publishing house based in a converted old dairy in Dorset, and charts the rise from cottage industry origins to a wide, prized backlist. With roots in rural writing, Little Toller has branched out to seek unusual voices, resurrecting the life of the wood engraver Clifford Webb, turning landfill into prose, uncovering Edward Thomas’s hidden photographs and finding a bestseller in the diary of a young naturalist along the way. We turn to the magazine’s archives for John Seymour’s advice on cheddaring, sparging and gaffing, and there’s the usual round-up of recommended reading from off the beaten track.

Slightly Foxed Editors’ Diary • 24 July 2020

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

On Sunday afternoon we set out for a walk in what is to me one of the strangest green spaces in this part of London, Abney Park Cemetery. Hidden behind the chic little boutiques and coffee shops of Stoke Newington Church Street, its 30-acre site originally formed part of the grounds of Fleetwood House and Abney House, both built in the 1600s and now demolished, one of which was lived in from 1734 until his death in 1748 by the preacher and hymn writer Isaac Watts.

J is for Juster, Norton | From the Slightly Foxed archives

‘If a rainbow ever fell to earth and became a book it would be The Phantom Tollbooth (1961) by Norton Juster. It is a thing of light, and wonder, and beauty.’

In this week’s free article from the archives, we welcome you to Dictionopolis, the realm of words ruled by King Azaz in Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth. You’ll find an extract in the newsletter, together with a link to read the full article by Rohan Candappa from Slightly Foxed Issue 29. We do hope you enjoy travelling beyond the tollbooth.

Episode 21: A Bookshelf in Tripoli

The Slightly Foxed Podcast

Justin Marozzi, a travel writer, historian and journalist who’s lived in Somalia, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and Darfur, joins the Slightly Foxed editors on a journey through North Africa and the Middle East. His discovery of a nineteenth-century account of an expedition to Libya in a bookshop in Tripoli led to his crossing of the Sahara by camel, against the advice of Wilfred Thesiger. From dual chronicles of the desert penned by Rosita Forbes and Ahmed Hassanein Bey and tales of books hurled into the Tigris to the picaresque life of Ibn Battutah and travels with a Tangerine, the conversation ranges far and wide, and there are the usual recommendations for reading off the beaten track too.

The Last Enemy | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

The Last Enemy by Richard Hillary is one of the great classic memoirs of the Second World War. Hillary was a charming, good-looking and rather arrogant young man, fresh from public school and Oxford, when, like many of his friends, he abandoned university to train as a pilot on the outbreak of war in 1939. At the flying training school, meeting men who hadn’t enjoyed the same gilded youth as he had, his view of the world, and of himself, began to change. Shot down in 1940 during the Battle of Britain, he suffered terrible burns and was treated by the pioneering plastic surgeon Archibald McIndoe. During those brief and gruelling wartime months this once privileged young man was forced to grow up as he struggled to come to terms with his defacing injuries and mourned the loss of his friends

The Great Oak Bookshop

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Slightly Foxed subscribers will receive a 10% discount at Great Oak Books, an independent bookshop in Llanidloes, Wales . . .

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Why Ronald Welch’s novels will help your children fall in love with history

Iona McLaren, The Telegraph

Ronald Welch, a tank commander turned schoolmaster, is one of the 20th century’s most underrated children’s writers. Like Hilary Mantel, he understood that what makes a lost epoch stick in your mind is not the dates but the details. His books positively foam with information . . .

Slightly Foxed Editors’ Diary • 30 June 2020

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

My admission in an earlier diary that, whereas my husband loves our nearby park, to me it just feels like pretend countryside, produced one shocked email and several hurt comments from local friends. Our contributor Roger Hudson (compiler, too, of An Englishman’s Commonplace Book, which we’ll be publishing in September) told me that he had once felt the same way about Kensington Gardens, but had made a ‘conscious decision to abandon comparison with the real country of his childhood’. He was helped in this, he said, by the facts that parts of Kensington Gardens still felt rather like the parkland of a country seat, so providing a kind of transitional experience, not quite town and not quite country, and he advised me to strike out away from the joggers and dog-walkers into the wilder areas.

H is for Hayter, Alethea | From the Slightly Foxed archives

In this week’s free article from the archives, we’re transported to literary London in the summer of 1846, ‘stifling in Elizabeth Barrett’s cluttered Wimpole Street room’. Penelope Lively’s piece on A Sultry Month by Alethea Hayter appeared in Slightly Foxed Issue 26.

Slightly Foxed Editors’ Diary • 23 June 2020

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

There was a time when we toyed with the idea of doing a holiday house-swap. Friends and acquaintances returned with exciting accounts of economical summers spent in other people’s houses, and holiday company brochures were full of tempting descriptions and heartfelt praise from customers who had formed lifelong friendships with other families in faraway places, getting to know the local community and going back year after year.

Episode 20: An Issue of Enthusiasms

The Slightly Foxed Podcast

Slightly Foxed Editors Gail and Hazel take us between the pages of the magazine, bookmarking articles along the way. Crack the spine of the quarterly to discover T. H. White taking flying lessons, smutty book titles, a passion for romantic ruins, John Berger shadowing a remarkable GP, a rebellious Mitford ‘rescued’ by a destroyer, a night to remember on the Titanic and much more besides. From correcting proofs to welcoming writers with a host of experiences, the story of putting together an issue of enthusiasms unfolds. And in this month’s reading from the archives, a hapless apprentice at the Hogarth Press recounts his disastrous stint with the Woolfs.

Slightly Foxed Editors’ Diary • 16 June 2020

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

With the latest easing of travel restrictions, there’s a lot of talk of public transport and who should use it, which in London mainly means the tube. When we first moved here in the early 1970s the Victoria Line from Walthamstow to Brixton via Highbury and Islington had only recently been built, and this brought with it the first of the estate agents who arrived to cash in on an area full of elderly residents easily persuaded to move out of their crumbling Georgian and Victorian properties and sell them to people like us.

My Grandfather & Father, Dear Father | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

We’ve been browsing our backlist of cloth-bound classics and thought it timely to open the covers of Denis Constanduros’s charming memoirs, My Grandfather and Father, Dear Father, published together in a handsome Slightly Foxed Edition. These delightfully funny and affectionate portraits of the most influential male figures in the author’s life conjure up two strongly defined characters and the times in which they lived.

Slightly Foxed Editors’ Diary • 9 June 2020

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

On Friday evening I had just settled comfortably into that delicious moment between waking and sleeping when there was a loud crash from the floor above my head. My first thought was that my husband had fallen over something, but since there was no cry for help I decided no action was required. After a moment or two of silence, however, sounds of banging from above began again. My second thought was that my husband might now be unable to speak and was banging on the floor to attract my attention, but he’s a hardy sort, and ashamed as I am to admit it, after only a moment’s hesitation I snuggled down again and pulled the bedclothes over my head.

Evening Standard Best Literary Podcasts for Book Lovers

Evening Standard

We’re delighted that the Slightly Foxed Podcast has been selected as one of the Evening Standard ten best literary podcasts for book lovers.

Slightly Foxed Editors’ Diary • 2 June 2020

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

This week we’ve been waking up to some of those blue and gold mornings that in my case bring on thoughts of escape and waves of nostalgia, not for hot exotic places, but for the English beaches that stay in your memory for ever if you were lucky enough to know them as a child. Growing up by the sea in Devon, spending all day on the beach (entirely unsupervised) or out in a fishing boat, I genuinely couldn’t imagine what people who didn’t live by the sea did all day. I adored Arthur Ransome’s books (see SF no. 18) but we weren’t Swallows and Amazons children, sailing and building campfires and being self-sufficient. Those kinds of summers were for the children who holidayed down the coast at posher places like Salcombe. For us the sea and the beach were facts of life, places where people earned their living, but they were magical too.

Cover Artist: Slightly Foxed Issue 66, Paul Cleden, ‘Boats and Coots’

Paul Cleden

Paul Cleden is an illustrator and printmaker who is especially drawn to figurative movement – the dynamic shapes of cyclists or skiers, rowers or divers, but equally a crowd at rush hour leaving a train or a dance hall crowded with figures. In depicting such scenes his use of linocut allows for beautiful flowing lines and the dramatic overlap of colours. His work can be seen in galleries across the UK and in commissions from, among others, the National Trust and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. For more see his website www.paulcleden.co.uk.

‘What larks!’

Antony Wood on Christopher Robbins, The Empress of Ireland

Essentially it is the story of the friendship between Christopher Robbins, a struggling young freelance journalist, and Brian Desmond Hurst, an ageing Irish film director who had already outlived his talents and gloriously continued to do so up to his death in 1986. For a delicious period of pure fantasy in the mid-1970s the two lived the life of Reilly together. When he first met Hurst the young Robbins was in his late twenties and vainly trying to claw his way out of perpetual debt. The agent of his introduction was an enigmatic American hipster masquerading as a German count whom he’d run into in Spain, and whose expertise was ‘putting people together’.

Slightly Foxed Issue 66: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

As we write this, towards the end of April, we are still in total lockdown because of the coronavirus. In these difficult times, we’d like to say how very touched we’ve been by all the extra efforts you’ve been making to support us, writing to us, extending your subscriptions and buying more books. It’s something we’ll never forget.

Life among the Ledgers

Pauline Melville on Herman Melville, ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street’

I am rather fond of the crowd that Dante meets at the very start of his journey into Hell with Virgil. They are all rushing around moaning and shrieking on the edge of the River Acheron, hoping that Charon the ferryman will carry them across. He refuses. When Dante asks who they are Virgil tells him that they are the ‘Futile’, the people who have done nothing in particular with their lives. They are not well-known for anything. They have achieved nothing spectacular either good or bad. They are not allowed into Heaven in case their dullness dims the radiant light of Paradise, and Hell won’t have them either because such an insipid bunch would downgrade the very notion of sinfulness. So they are not allowed passage across the river. They are seen hurrying to assemble under one flag and then fleeing in the opposite direction to assemble under another. They sound like most of us. Anyway, I number myself among them.

1 Jun 2020

A Modern Prospero

Brandon Robshaw on Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea

The Sea, The Sea was Iris Murdoch’s nineteenth novel and the only one to win the Booker Prize (in 1978). It is, to my mind, her best novel, as well as being the most representative of her talents and distinctive world view. It is also hypnotically readable. Actually all her novels are hypnotically readable (with the sad exception of her last, fractured book, Jackson’s Dilemma), but most contain certain faults of excess: passages of over-description, stagey scenes, unrealistic over-intellectualized dialogue, plotting whose artifice is all too obvious. This does not make them less lovable or less intellectually stimulating. Still: you can see the joins. This is not the case with The Sea, The Sea.

1 Jun 2020

Keeping up Appearances

Kate Tyte on Eve Garnett, The Family from One End Street

Eve Garnett’s children’s novel was first published in 1937, with her own illustrations. At least eight publishers had rejected it on account of its supposed ‘grittiness’. Here was a story about an urban working-class family that detailed the endless struggles of Mr and Mrs Ruggles – a dustman and a washerwoman – to feed, clothe and shoe their seven children. In fact the book was probably the first ever British children’s book with working-class protagonists. Despite publishers’ initial reluctance, it was an immediate success. Serialized by the BBC in 1939, it won the Library Association’s prestigious Carnegie Medal – beating The Hobbit – and has been in print ever since. In a market saturated with stories about boarding-schools, nannies and improbable Swallows and Amazons-type adventures, parents and children alike warmed to the novelty of the Ruggles.

Nothing but the Best

Daniel Worsley on Iris Origo, The Merchant of Prato

It was grudgingly that I started to read Iris Origo’s The Merchant of Prato. My wife told me to. She had been referred to it for her studies. It sounded dry stuff, the re-creation of the life of a fourteenth century Tuscan businessman from his account books and correspondence. We had each been handed down copies of Iris’s immensely readable Images and Shadows (1970) in which she describes how in the 1920s she and her Italian husband bought the derelict estate of La Foce south of Siena and painstakingly re-established the mezzadria system. This had been used in Tuscany from the days of the Roman Republic, the landlords providing the upkeep of the farms and paying for half of everything needed for cultivation, and receiving in return a half share of all that was produced.

An Early-Flowering Climber

Ursula Buchan on the plant-hunting and garden writings of Reginald Farrer

Reginald Farrer (1880‒1920) was unprepossessing in appearance, with a hare lip (the result of a cleft palate) only partially hidden by a moustache, a ‘pygmy body’ and a high, piercing voice. The son of narrowly Anglican parents (his father was a well-to-do landowner and Liberal MP, and the family were closely connected to the Sitwells), he was educated at home, at Ingleborough Hall in Clapham, in the Yorkshire Dales, and spent his boyhood gardening and searching for rare wild flowers on the nearby peak of Ingleborough.

Labours of Love

Paul Edwards on Alan Ross, Coastwise Lights

The words on Alan Ross’s gravestone could hardly be simpler: ‘Writer, poet and editor’. They could scarcely be more accurate either, although one wonders whether their subject might have given his commitment to poetry pride of place. Alan is buried in the churchyard in Clayton, the Sussex village where he lived for twenty-five years and where he knew great happiness. That happiness was particularly precious to a man who also experienced the fathomless miseries of depression.

A Hot-Water Bottle and a Horse

Sarah Crowden on Penelope Chetwode, Two Middle-Aged Ladies in Andalusia

Long before the term was used to describe talent-free people in the public eye, John Betjeman was a celebrity: Poet Laureate, saviour of ancient buildings and National Treasure. But though his wife Penelope is affectionately portrayed in his letters, and in a biography by their granddaughter Imogen Lycett-Green, for me she always remained an enigma. Until, that is, I was cast to play her in a BBC Radio production and discovered the first of her two books, Two Middle-Aged Ladies in Andalusia (1963).

A Long Way from Surrey

Simon Winder on H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau

A decade ago I took a decision which has made me happy ever since. At Christmas I would read only short books. This switch was first achieved when I decided to limit my holiday reading to the four extraordinary little fantasies that H. G. Wells wrote in quick succession, starting in 1894 at a desk in a Sevenoaks boarding-house: The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds. When he had finished he had gone from total obscurity to being one of the most famous authors in the world.

1 Jun 2020

On the Shoulders of Giants

Andrew Joynes on T. H. White, England Have My Bones

We would race past a Saxon church, its western hindquarters sunk into the hillside, a kindly beast emerging from its lair. We would teeter in slow motion beside the dark timbers of a medieval bridge. And by the time we dismounted to wheel our bicycles across the main road beneath the glass escarpment of a public school’s immense chapel, we would be looking seawards to the windsock of the airfield and skywards for the light aircraft – Tiger Moths, Chipmunks, Dragon Rapides – which were the objects of our plane-spotting pilgrimage. I am reminded of those sunlit days, and of the ‘whooshpering’ sound of the canvas wings as the aircraft swept in above us, whenever I take down my copy of T. H. White’s England Have My Bones (1936). It is a book for browsing, for it takes the form of a journal which White kept through four seasons in 1934–5, the year he took flying lessons at a small airfield in the middle of England.

These Fragments

Jon Woolcott on John Harris, No Voice from the Hall

I’ve always loved ruins and vanished buildings. If you share that interest, and many don’t, finding a fellow obsessive is wonderful. My fascination had lasted decades before I came across Harris’s book No Voice from the Hall (1998) and found a kindred spirit. Subtitled Early Memories of a Country House Snooper, it describes his teenage expeditions hitch-hiking across England – mostly – in search of derelict great houses in the aftermath of the Second World War.

Partying down at the Palace

Mick Herron on John Steinbeck, Sweet Thursday & Cannery Row

Sweet Thursday, published in 1954, is a sequel to Cannery Row (1945). Both are set in the Californian town of Monterey, once a bright and bustling place whose canning industry meant that the locals could always find employment when all else failed, but which in the post-war years – ‘when all the pilchards were caught and canned and eaten’ – has become a sleepy backwater, no part of which is dozier than Cannery Row itself, where the same few dollars make the same regular journeys between saloon and grocery and brothel, everyone owes money to somebody else, and nobody’s really keeping score.

1 Jun 2020

An Outsider in Tregonissey

Annabel Walker on A. L. Rowse, A Cornish Childhood

There will be readers who find A Cornish Childhood too rooted in the egotism for which A. L. Rowse was well-known, or uncomfortably tinged with disdain for others – he dishes out verdicts such as ‘vapid’, ‘deplorable’ and ‘puerile’ with seeming equanimity and is unafraid of making dismissive generalizations about ‘the people’. At a distance of almost eighty years from publication, I mostly feel fairly forgiving towards such comments, amused rather than outraged and prepared to overlook them since his outspokenness seems so obviously a product of his particular circumstances.

Simply Delicious

Clive Unger-Hamilton on Theodora FitzGibbon, A Taste of Paris

The food writer Theodora FitzGibbon was a late beginner, professionally speaking. Born Theodora Rosling in 1916 she received a cosmopolitan education, travelling widely in Europe and Asia with her Irish father Adam, a naval officer and bon viveur afflicted with wanderlust as well as a wandering eye. Theodora had a number of siblings conceived on the wrong side of the blanket. He also introduced his daughter to the delights of whiskey and cigars at a perilously early age.

Hazy Memories of Hanging Rock

Kate Young on Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock

I have been reading aloud from Picnic at Hanging Rock for three hours when my friend touches the window beside her. I do the same; given the blasting air-conditioning, it seems impossible that the glass could be so hot. But it is – we have left behind the breezes of the coast, and the cooling altitude of the mountains. This is the Australian outback, 400 kilometres south-west of Canberra, and it is 44 degrees in the shade. We pull over and step out, and the heat hits us like a wall.

Underwater Heaven

Margaret Drabble on Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies

I can’t remember what age I was when I came across Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies. I must have read it earlier than my other childhood favourite, Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, which was a Christmas gift in 1948, but at that age I can’t have tackled the Kingsley tale in its full version. I must have read a shortened illustrated children’s text, of which there have been many. I loved the story of Tom’s adventures, first as a dirty chimney-sweep intruding on little Ellie in her fine white bedchamber, then when he went on the run through a landscape that strangely mixes Yorkshire and Devon, then as a water-baby, as he ventures down the rivers and into the sea. I sympathized with his loneliness and with his longing to find other water-babies, and rejoiced with him when he discovered that the sea was full of them.

Slightly Foxed Editors’ Diary • 26 May 2020

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

One benefit of the lockdown is that we’ve begun to explore our local neighbourhood in a way we hadn’t done before. Roads that we previously hurried down on our way to somewhere else have suddenly come into focus, revealing bits of local history we hadn’t known about.

F is for Fisher, M. F. K. | From the Slightly Foxed archives

In this week’s free article from the archives, we travel back to SF Issue 13 with Jane Lunzer Gifford and sample the gastronomical delights of M. F. K. Fisher’s food writing. We do hope you enjoy this taste of Slightly Foxed.

Slightly Foxed Editors’ Diary • 19 May 2020

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

Every Thursday now at 8 p.m. in London and across the country, we stand on our doorsteps and clap and bang saucepans as a thank-you to the NHS nurses and doctors and all the other workers who put their lives on the line for us every day and night of the week. On 12 May it was, appropriately, International Nurses Day, which is celebrated on Florence Nightingale’s birthday (her 200th this year), and hearing her mentioned on various radio programmes, I took down Cecil Woodham-Smith’s biography, published in 1950, and read the first few chapters.

Episode 19: Tim Pears’s West Country

The Slightly Foxed Podcast

Tim Pears, a writer rooted in the landscape of Devon, takes Slightly Foxed to the West Country. From working at his local library and reading an author a week instead of taking his A Levels to winning the Hawthornden Prize for his first novel, by way of spells as a farm labourer, nursing assistant and night porter, Tim Pears has written eleven novels, watched blacksmiths at work, walked the routes of his characters, balanced research with imagination and chronicled the past as a realist rather than a romantic. We also travel through the magazine’s archives, along the rivers Taw and Torridge, to uncover the man behind Tarka the Otter, and there are the usual recommendations for reading off the beaten track.

Slightly Foxed Editors’ Diary • 12 May 2020

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

Though I have now just about learned how to make video calls from my smartphone, as mentioned in an earlier diary, the practical and technical challenges of the lockdown continue. A friend emailed me recently with the link to a mask-making tutorial on YouTube. We’re all going to have to wear masks and there are likely to be shortages, so why not start stitching now, she suggested. I could make them in different colours for the whole family, including fun ones for the grandchildren. I watched as deft fingers cut, tacked, sewed and turned bits inside out but couldn’t really make sense of it all and decided to leave it for another day.

Support Independent Bookshops | A Directory

Bookshops are having a tough time at the moment, so do please support them if you can. They’re doing all within their power to get good reading to their customers, with many able to take orders and deliver books. We’ve put together a list of many of our bookshops’ services.

Slightly Foxed Editors’ Diary • 5 May 2020

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

A highly sensitive translator friend of ours once told us, quite seriously, that he couldn’t read in a room where there were other books. Their presence was too distracting, too powerful. We sniggered rather unkindly at the time, but this week, wandering round the bookshelves and feeling somewhat cut-off and unreal in the dim light of a wet afternoon, I felt acutely the presence of authors I’d once been passionately attached to and hadn’t thought of for a long time, especially the diarists, nestling in the ‘biography’ section in the spare room.

D is for Deakin, Roger | From the Slightly Foxed archives

In this week’s free article from the Slightly Foxed archives, Sarah Anderson takes the plunge into Roger Deakin’s Waterlog. We’ll leave you with this bracing journey through the waterways of Britain from SF Issue 6, and we hope you enjoy reading it.

Slightly Foxed Editors’ Diary • 28 April 2020

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

When the lockdown first began and we were instructed to leave the house only for an hour’s regular exercise we started going for an early evening walk in our local park. My husband loves Clissold Park. Over the years he’s run round it, watched birds in it, observed the trees in their various seasons, pushed our daughter on the swings, and played football with our grandchildren. He feels sentimental about it, and it is a lovely park. Like a lot of London parks it was once attached to a private house, and that has now become an upmarket café where yummy mummies sit chatting in the sun with their expensive buggies beside them, and media dads queue up for posh ice creams while speaking amusingly on the phone to other media dads.

Slightly Foxed Editors’ Diary • 21 April 2020

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

There’s an old Victorian sofa in the bay window of our bedroom that we bought in a junk shop in Norfolk many years ago. It’s pretty battered now, the pale green loose cover is somewhat torn despite my efforts to mend it and some of the springs have gone. It really should be reupholstered but, apart from the expense, I’m unwilling. It feels like an old friend who’s seen me through various periods of my life and I don’t want to change it by giving it a facelift. The ends let down so you can put your feet up, and there’s a nice comfortable depression in the seat where your bottom goes. That’s where I’ve been reading in the afternoons for the past few weeks.

Episode 18: The Ordeal of Evelyn Waugh

The Slightly Foxed Podcast

The great prose stylist of the 20th century, monster, performer? Biographer and literary journalist Selina Hastings and writer and critic Alexander Waugh reveal the many reputations of Evelyn Waugh with the Slightly Foxed editors. From a pathological fear of boredom, hallucinations provoked by doses of bromide and cheques bouncing at the Ritz to his relationships conducted through letters, his genius for sharp satire and love of gossip, the conversation brings to light the darkness and humour of Waugh’s works. And we visit The Loved One’s Whispering Glades in this month’s reading from the magazine’s archives.

B is for Baker, J. A. | From the Slightly Foxed archives

We’re continuing our travels through the Slightly Foxed archive, selecting an article a week that everyone – whether you’re a subscriber to the magazine or not – can read for free while spending more time at home. This week Annabel Walker takes us to buzzard country as she rides the wind and tracks peregrines with J. A. Baker in this article from SF Issue 45.

Slightly Foxed Editors’ Diary • 10 April 2020

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

The room where I work – to call it ‘my study’ sounds too grand somehow and ‘my office’ feels too businesslike – is almost at the top of the house and faces on to the garden. Sitting at my desk I look out into the branches of a giant sycamore where grey squirrels race up and down, but if I stand up I can look down into our own small garden, and the others in the terrace stretching away in a sort of wedge shape, getting longer as they go. In some of them the flowering cherry trees are out (‘loveliest of trees’ as Housman called the woodland cherries), and the big hawthorn at the bottom of our garden, which hides the worst of the red-brick care home over the wall, is just coming into bud. Through the arch in the entrance to the care home I can usually see cars moving along Highbury New Park, but there are almost none today. The schools are open only to the children of front-line workers now, and I can hear the little girls next door calling to one another in the garden.

Slightly Foxed Editors’ Diary • 3 April 2020

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

It’s no secret that neither Gail nor I are entirely comfortable in the digital world, but stuck at home as we are I’m having to try to get to grips with all the untapped possibilities of my smartphone. I’m finding this something of a challenge as my communications are usually limited to calls of the ‘I’m on the bus now and should be back about 6.30’ variety. This week our kind neighbour joined me up to the street’s WhatsApp group and shortly after I found I was broadcasting the conversation I’d had with my husband at breakfast to the entire street and didn’t know how to stop it. This has unnerved me, but I’m told the world is full of puzzled children looking at pictures of disembodied knees and hands as grandparents attempt to have a conversation with them on FaceTime or Skype.

Slightly Foxed Issue 1: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

Welcome to the first issue of Slightly Foxed, the magazine for adventurous readers – people who want to explore beyond the familiar territory of the national review pages and magazines, and who are interested in books that last rather than those that are simply fashionable. We plan to bring you, each quarter, a selection of books that have passed the test of time, that have excited, fascinated or influenced our contributors, and to which they return for pleasure, comfort or escape; the kind of books that sell steadily and quietly to those who know about them, but are no longer to be found on the review pages or sometimes even on the bookshop shelves.

Slightly Foxed Issue 2: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

Slightly Foxed was officially launched on 11 March at Daunt Books in Marylebone High Street, w1. Daunt’s was a perfect setting, embodying everything you would hope for in a bookshop – helpful, well-informed staff, a wide and well-ordered selection of books, quick service, even polished wood panelling. It was a pleasure to see all the people who have helped to make Slightly Foxed a reality gathered together to wish it well.

Slightly Foxed Issue 3: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

Since Slightly Foxed was launched, its office has been comfortably sited in Canonbury, a quiet part of North London with leafy roads and literary associations: George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Louis MacNeice and Nancy Mitford are just a few of the writers who have lived in its Georgian and early Victorian houses – usually during periods when they were somewhat down on their luck. Since then Canonbury has come up in the world, but there are still many writers living nearby.

Slightly Foxed Issue 4: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

Slightly Foxed has now settled comfortably into Clerkenwell. The only drawback of the new office is the spectacular view – we spend far too much time watching the clouds, which at this time of year race over the dome of St Paul’s at a sometimes alarming rate. (If you’d like to come and visit – and don’t mind aged dogs – you’d be most welcome.) We haven’t spotted any Christmas lights going up yet, but it can’t be long.

Slightly Foxed Issue 5: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

Slightly Foxed celebrates its first birthday this month, and we send special thanks and good wishes to our original subscribers who so sportingly took us on trust a year ago. We’re absolutely delighted that so many of you have decided to re-subscribe – a good number for two years. If you know of anyone who just hasn’t got round to it yet, it’s still not too late, and our offer of a reduction on a two-year subscription still stands (if you’re feeling generous, of course, you could always give them a gift subscription). And for anyone who missed the early issues and would like to complete the set, a limited number of back issues are still available.

Slightly Foxed Issue 6: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

It’s a hopeful time of year. The stalwart London plane trees have unfurled their leaves, and the sun is rising higher behind the City domes, towers and spires that we can see from our now not-so-new office windows. City-dwellers are beginning, as Hardy said, to ‘dream of the south and west’, and we hope that the travellers among you, armchair and otherwise, will enjoy Barnaby Rogerson’s piece on travel writing on p.11.

Slightly Foxed Issue 7: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

Sadly, just as we were celebrating the arrival of the summer issue, we lost a member of our team. On 15 June, Jennings the cocker spaniel died peacefully in his sleep at the age of 13. We miss him greatly. He was in on the earliest beginnings of Slightly Foxed, always beside us at meetings to remind us with a yawn or a discreet whine that things had gone on too long, always good-humoured and enthusiastic. He bore his increasing deafness and loss of sight without irritability, but it became obvious this year that he was failing. His brother Pugwash, by contrast, is in rude health and, after a decent period of mourning, is now enjoying his position as top and only dog. But he lacks Jennings’s subtlety.

Slightly Foxed Issue 8: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

It’s Christmas again – our second, which seems cause for celebration in itself, especially as subscriptions are holding steady and even (dare we say it) creeping up. We raise a celebratory glass both to those of you who have stuck with us, as the publisher Anthony Blond once said, through thin and thin, and to those of you who have come on board more recently. Thank you for all your letters of appreciation and encouragement. Slightly Foxed subscribers do seem a most convivial group of people – humorous, enthusiastic, impatient of pomposity, and with a telling, even poetic, turn of phrase (‘Ten minutes ago, out of the Atlantic wind, came the postman carrying Slightly Foxed ’ begins a recent e-mail from a subscriber in Donegal).

Slightly Foxed Issue 9: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

When we mentioned last year that we were moving to a new office, with spectacular views over St Paul’s, we’re not sure what image this will have conjured up. One of those atmospheric, old-fashioned magazine offices perhaps, heaped with books and unread submissions, where coffee was made with a kettle rather than a machine and the switchboard was manned by a chirpy character who’d been there for decades, recognized callers’ voices and always knew where everyone was.

Slightly Foxed Issue 10: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

At the end of February we travelled north through sleet and snow to see the spring issue of Slightly Foxed coming off the press. As many of you will know, Slightly Foxed is printed by the friendly firm of Smith Settle in Otley, and we and twenty or so of our Yorkshire subscribers spent a thoroughly enjoyable afternoon seeing round the works – a tour which was followed by a convivial get-together over cake and a glass of Madeira.

Slightly Foxed Issue 11: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

It’s one of those pleasant moments when nothing very particular is happening in the office. Pugwash the cocker spaniel is snoring in the late summer sunshine by the terrace window, a splendid helper is stuffing envelopes on the kitchen table, and from time to time the phone rings with a request for a slipcase or a subscription. Or it may be one of you just ringing in for a chat, which is always delightful. It’s a golden, meditative time, when the summer’s nearly over and the madness of the Christmas season hasn’t begun.

Slightly Foxed Issue 12: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

Well, it’s Christmas again. We’re glad to report that as the year ends Slightly Foxed is bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, with subscriptions coming in, the direct debit system up and running, and an excellent response to our modest forays into merchandizing.

Slightly Foxed Issue 13: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

Emerging from the miasma of winter colds and flu that hung over the office – even Pugwash was under the weather – we were immensely cheered by the splendid selection of Christmas cards you sent us, many of them fox-related. We enjoy all your letters and postcards too. Thank you so much. We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: our contact with you, our subscribers, is one of the great pleasures of life at Slightly Foxed.

Slightly Foxed Issue 14: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

No doubt you’ve noticed, as we have, how smartly the press has jumped on to the ecological bandwagon. Over the past twelve months we’ve received special ‘green’ issues of various magazines, encouraging us to inspect our supermarket fruit and veg for country of origin, buy a wormery and avoid flying if at all possible.

Slightly Foxed Issue 15: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

Time and tide, as they say, wait for no man, and the past few months have seen some significant changes in the office of Slightly Foxed.

Our marketing manager Kathleen, who did wonderful work in getting copies of SF into bookshops when we were starting out, has just moved, with her two small children and her designer husband James (who draws the foxes which often appear on our covers), to become Events Manager at Robert Topping’s new bookshop in Bath. We miss her greatly, but we keep in close touch (anyone who’s ever been part of Slightly Foxed still continues, somehow, to be ‘on the strength’) and we’ll be launching our Winter issue at the Bath bookshop.

Slightly Foxed Issue 16: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

With mist obscuring the dome of St Paul’s and winter closing in, it seems a long time since we were driving through lush, sunlit Devon lanes to the launch of the Autumn issue at the (tiny) Big Red Sofa bookshop in Chagford, right on the edge of Dartmoor. As always it was a convivial get-together, with subscribers coming from as far away as Exmouth, and keen interest taken from the bookshop regulars in Slightly Foxed. This beautiful area, where moor and countryside meet, is home territory to Gail. Her family have long connections with it, and our visit to Devon was combined with a splendid housewarming for the eco-friendly house that she and her husband have dreamed about for years and which is now finally finished, down to the last slab of granite and foot of grass roof. However, don’t panic. Gail, like the rest of us, is still based in London, and SF continues exactly as before.

Slightly Foxed Issue 17: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

Well, Spring again, and with it the start of a fresh venture. As we mentioned in the last issue, for some time now we’ve been becoming increasingly aware of the number of excellent books that have been allowed to slip out of print – in particular those fascinating memoirs and personal accounts that bring alive a particular moment or place, that allow you into someone else’s world and make you feel you have actually known the writer. Often these books light up a period in a way that no history book can. So it seemed to us to make sense to reprint some of them. From now on with each issue of Slightly Foxed we’ll be offering a new title, with a piece to introduce it in the issue itself.

Slightly Foxed Issue 18: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

One of the things we’ve learned during the four plus years we’ve been going is that you, our subscribers, are the kind of people who like to keep in touch. You write to us (such heart-warming letters); if you happen to be in London you visit (you’re always welcome – apart from the pleasure of seeing you, it gives us an excuse to drag ourselves away from the computer); and we often enjoy a chat with those of you who phone us when the time comes to renew.

Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2020

The Biographers’ Club is now accepting submissions for The Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2020. This year’s judges are Rupert Christiansen, Selina Hastings and Alexander Masters.

Slightly Foxed Issue 19: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

For some months now, at our regular get-togethers, the five of us have been sitting round the table, chewing our pens and agonizing over the question: Is it time to put the price of Slightly Foxed up? We’ve held it for nearly five years – since we started in fact – and during that time the cost of postage has risen four times and the price of paper has risen twice, not to mention all the usual running costs of the office. (Even Pugwash’s running costs have risen steeply as he’s a very wobbly old dog now, rather like Thurber’s dog Muggs, who would wander unnervingly about ‘like Hamlet following his father’s ghost’.) Needless to say, we’ve done everything we can to keep costs down – including no staff pay-rises – but those who advise us on our finances have been murmuring with ever-growing insistence about the need to increase our price and urging us to do so.

Slightly Foxed Issue 20: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

This issue marks a bit of a celebration for us – Slightly Foxed’s fifth we birthday. It seems no time ago – certainly not twenty issues – that we we’re sitting round the kitchen table, arguing about a title, discussing printers and finances and page designs and paper thicknesses, and how to get the word out about a new quarterly that — let’s be frank — a lot of people felt couldn’t possibly work.

Slightly Foxed Issue 21: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

It’s bitterly cold today – frost on the London roofs, and the spires of the City churches rising sharp and white against an ice-blue sky. For a lot of us it feels internally pretty cold too. Talk in the news of worse economic times to come, global warming, wars across the world. One could get pretty depressed . . .

Slightly Foxed Issue 22: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

The Slightly Foxed office hasn’t changed much over the years, apart from the fact that, as we’ve already mentioned, it’s got more crowded, what with the increasing number of back issues and the new Slightly Foxed Editions. This is of course especially true when we’ve just had a delivery from our printers, Smith Settle, which arrives via their driver, Brian, who sets off from Yorkshire in the dark hours and arrives in London in time for an early cup of tea.

Slightly Foxed Issue 23: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

The summer seems to have flown by, with nothing more dramatic to report from the Slightly Foxed office than the theft of Jennie’s bike (two sturdy locks and all – that’s London for you) and the small dramas surrounding the presence of Chudleigh, our now not-so-new puppy who, though growing up fast, is still inclined to exercise his jaws on paper, pens, clothing, handbags and upholstery.

Slightly Foxed Issue 24: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

Well. We’re sitting here quivering slightly because we’ve done something rather rash. We’ve bought a second-hand bookshop. Actually, we’re pretty excited about it. Like many good things, it came to us in a serendipitous way. Not many months ago word reached us that Nick Dennys, the owner of the Gloucester Road Bookshop (123 Gloucester Road, London SW7) was looking for someone sympathetic to buy the business. The bearer of the news wondered if we might be interested.

Slightly Foxed Issue 25: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

Now the Christmas rush is over and spring is in the air, it’s all paint charts and carpet samples at Slightly Foxed. The bookshop facelift is under way, and after dealing with urgent matters like leaks and cracks – it’s an old building and the storeroom and office space run under the pavement, with all that that implies – we’re on to the fun part now. We’re (slightly) changing the name to ‘Slightly Foxed on Gloucester Road’ – look out for the foxy sign! In corporate-speak it would probably be called ‘rebranding’, but as you know, we’re anything but corporate, and in any case we don’t want to change the shop’s essential welcoming character, which its regulars value so much.

Slightly Foxed Issue 26: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

Our bookshop is truly up and running now under its new banner ‘Slightly Foxed on Gloucester Road’. Renovations have been modest – fresh paint, new carpet, some moveable shelving to allow us to create space for launch parties and events and, as a finishing touch, a traditional pub-style hanging sign featuring the fox. Frankly, we’re so thrilled with it it’s hard for us to keep away, and we do hope that any of you visiting London will drop in there too, to have a browse and meet Tony and the rest of the staff. You’ll find a bookshop leaflet with more details in this issue.

Slightly Foxed Issue 27: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

Autumn. Season of mists . . . Chudleigh the office dog is getting his winter coat and we’re thinking of turning on the heating. Traditionally autumn is also one of the busiest publishing seasons when firms launch their ‘big’ books in time for the Christmas market, and review pages and bookshop displays expand.

Slightly Foxed Issue 28: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

Predictably perhaps, given the season, it’s all go here at Slightly Foxed, what with dispatching the new book bags (for which there’s been a gratifying demand – hurry while stocks last!), taking orders and sending off copies of the quarterly to new subscribers. Then, of course, there’s fulfilling requests for Slightly Foxed Editions, forwarding orders for slipcases (also very popular at this time of year), chatting on the phone to those of you who ring us with enquiries and suggestions (always welcome), not to mention all the stuffing and franking of envelopes that goes with a small business like ours.

Slightly Foxed Issue 29: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

‘Spring, the sweet spring . . .’ The flower shop round the corner from Slightly Foxed is full of daffodils and hyacinths now, and from our window the City spires are standing out sharply against a pale blue sky. It feels as if everything is drawing breath after the long cold winter, and after a busy season we’re drawing breath too.

Slightly Foxed Issue 30: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

At this time of year, one can’t help noticing, the population of London changes. In the centre of town the buses and tubes are filled with overseas visitors and a Babel of foreign voices. But the narrow streets around us in Clerkenwell are strangely quiet, emptied of the crowds of workers who normally fill the local pubs and wine bars. It feels as if the clocks have gone back fifty years.

Slightly Foxed Issue 31: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

There’s an invigorating sharpness in the air now, that frosty tang that brings with it thoughts of country walks, winter fires, evenings with a good book, the possibilities of a new term. And with that, we can’t resist straightaway mentioning Mr Tibbits’s Catholic School by Ysenda Maxtone Graham, the latest of our Slightly Foxed Editions (see p. 12), and possibly the funniest we’ve published so far.

Slightly Foxed Issue 32: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

We’re sitting here in the office today, looking out at the leaden sky and wondering what next year’s going to be like. It’s rather a ruminative time we find, these last dark months before Christmas. One thing we do know, and that is that we’re extremely fortunate to have such a loyal body of subscribers. Some of you have been with us from the very beginning and have stuck with us ‘through thin and thin’ as the late publisher Anthony Blond once succinctly put it. We’d like you to know how grateful we are for your support – for your enthusiastic letters, encouraging phone calls, for spreading the word about Slightly Foxed – and of course for your renewed subscriptions.

Slightly Foxed Issue 33: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

Now the year has turned and spring bulbs are bravely poking up in Clerkenwell window-boxes, we’re looking forward hopefully, as well as looking back thoughtfully over the events of the past year, which was quite an adventurous one for SF.

Slightly Foxed Issue 34: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

Summer: the season of literary festivals, and Slightly Foxed is on the road. Our travels began early with an appearance, with author and contributor Penelope Lively, at the Words by the Water Festival in Cumbria in early March. Later that month we were at Christ Church, Oxford, for the first in what we hope will be a regular series of Slightly Foxed talks on forgotten authors at the Oxford Literary Festival. This year the philosopher and critic John Gray delivered a brilliant and entertaining talk on the work of John Cowper Powys, arising from the piece he wrote in our spring issue, neatly placing Powys as ‘an outdoor Proust’. On 14 June we’ll be launching the summer issue at Mr B’s cosy and very individual bookshop in Bath. And on Sunday 8 July we’ll be appearing at the West Meon Literary Festival in Hampshire with our contributor and prize-winning biographer Maggie Fergusson.

Slightly Foxed Issue 35: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

One of the most enjoyable things we do at Slightly Foxed – and there are many – is the commissioning of our covers. People often say they wish they could have reproductions of them, and so, in the spring, Alarys did some research, and we went off to visit a couple of small, environmentally friendly firms. One, in Lincolnshire, has now produced a lovely Slightly Foxed tea-towel for us in hard-wearing unbleached cotton decorated with one of our most cheerful spring covers, and the other, in Berkshire, a mixed pack of four fine-quality cards of the most popular ones – two with a spring and summer and two with a winter theme.

Slightly Foxed Issue 36: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

It seems, as they say, only yesterday that we were telling you Slightly Foxed would be moving – in fact it was in 2004 that we moved from our original ‘office’ round the kitchen table of Gail’s home in Canonbury to the family’s new home in Clerkenwell. For eight years we roosted gratefully at Dickinson Court, gradually expanding, like the proverbial cuckoo, until we’d virtually taken over; turning the spare room into a post room, filling every available alcove with back issues and filing trays, and the hall with bicycles and parcels of books.

Slightly Foxed Issue 37: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

We’re now comfortably settled at our new home in Hoxton Square which, being a proper office rather than part of a flat, is far more spacious and functional than Brewhouse Yard. We do miss the spectacular view we had there of London’s domes and towers rising against the sky behind St Paul’s, but we’re enjoying the edgy inner city feel of Hoxton with its little specialist bookshops, vegetarian restaurants and bicycles chained to the railings among the plane trees and scruffy city pigeons. Thank you so much, all of you who sent us good wishes for the move and appreciative Christmas cards. We were extremely touched to receive them.

Slightly Foxed Editors’ Diary • 27 March 2020

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

We thought it might be cheering for all of us in these unusual and unpredictable times if we kept in touch with you via a weekly diary. It won’t be a work of literature, and it won’t be simply, or even mostly, about books, but just a way of sharing with you, wherever you are in the world, how the two of us are living our day-to-day lives in very different parts of England. We feel we’ve come to know so many of you as friends from your letters, emails and phone calls, and if there was ever a time for friends to keep in touch, it’s surely now. So here goes. Gail is writing from her West Country house on the edge of Dartmoor while Hazel is holed up at home in Highbury, North London.

Slightly Foxed Issue 38: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

Well, summer’s here – at last. There are still plenty of people about in Hoxton Square, but it won’t be long before the city starts to empty out and that particular summer quiet descends which, if you’re still working, makes you feel both grateful and wistful at the same time.

Slightly Foxed Issue 39: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

The summer has sped by and we’ve been travelling, giving talks about Slightly Foxed (with the essential tea and cakes) at the kind of small local festivals that often seem to have more meaning than the bigger events. They’re a great opportunity for us to meet local subscribers and see some very beautiful parts of the country. On 20 September we’ll be in another lovely place, Much Wenlock in Shropshire, where we’ll be talking at Wenlock Books.

Slightly Foxed Issue 40: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

This fortieth issue is a very special one for us. It marks the beginning of our anniversary year – ten years since we came up with the idea for Slightly Foxed and tentatively put together our first issue. They’re years in which we’ve got to know some of the most likeable and entertaining people – both subscribers and contributors – enjoyed some of the best laughs, been introduced to some of the best books, and had some of the most varied (and sometimes eccentric) experiences. During those years children have married and grandchildren have been born, Slightly Foxed has grown, and we’ve been joined by some exceptionally nice, clever and hardworking young members of staff. We can only say thank you to the Fox and to all of you who’ve supported us for giving us some of the happiest years of our working lives.

Slightly Foxed Issue 41: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

As we mentioned in the last issue, we’re marking our tenth anniversary this year in various ways, but perhaps most importantly with the publication of a very unusual little book. It’s called Slightly Famous People’s Foxes and proceeds from the sale will go to buy books for the Hospital School at Great Ormond Street, which enables children to continue their education while they are there. These won’t be textbooks but books to read for pleasure – most of us probably know how just the right book can ease a stay in hospital, especially for children who may be in isolation or having long and painful treatments. It’s a cause close to our hearts, and we’d be delighted if you felt able to give it your support. The book costs a very affordable £5, and you’ll find a leaflet and an order form enclosed with this issue.

Slightly Foxed Issue 42: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

With travel in the air, summer’s a time when we think particularly of all those subscribers who read their copies of Slightly Foxed in farflung places. We have subscribers in 60 countries now, and in this tenth anniversary year we’d like to say thank you once again to all of you, at home and abroad, for supporting us, and particularly to those of you who have stuck with us through – as the late publisher Antony Blond once memorably put it – thin and thin. We had an excellent anniversary party – at the Art Workers’ Guild in Bloomsbury, already familiar to some of you from Readers’ Day. Speeches were made, glasses were raised, and Slightly Famous People’s Foxes, the little book we’re publishing in aid of the Children’s Hospital School at Great Ormond Street, was successfully launched.

Slightly Foxed Issue 43: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

Our anniversary year is almost over, and it’s been marked by many good things – not least the installation of a new kitchen area in the office by our very efficient and cheerful builder Pzremek. Now that the leaves are turning in the square and the air is getting chilly, it’s a big bonus at lunchtime to have an oven that actually works!

Slightly Foxed Issue 44: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

Another year almost gone. The lights are going on early now in Hoxton Square, and on misty evenings there’s a sense of a ghostly earlier London hovering just out of reach, while only a few hundred yards away down Old Street huge shiny office blocks are rising to create a new ‘Tech City’. It’s making us feel a bit ruminative. Thanks to Jennie and all the young staff, we’re keeping up with and making good use of all the new technology, but we do also cling to what might be called ‘old-fashioned’ values – giving a really prompt and personal service to readers, keeping up our production standards, not cutting corners on writing and editing, and treating our suppliers and contributors decently. Thanks to you we’ve survived the recession, but things are still very tough for small businesses like Slightly Foxed, and our values do come at a cost.

Slightly Foxed Issue 45: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

Intimations of spring at last! The days are lengthening, watery spring sunlight is filtering through the bare trees in the square, there’s a jug of daffodils on the windowsill, and the tatty old London pigeons are billing and cooing on the parapet outside the office.

Slightly Foxed Issue 46: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

Now the long summer days are here we like to get out of the city, to meet subscribers and get to know some of the many independent local bookshops which, in spite of difficult times, are still very much alive and kicking. On 11 June we’ll be in Suffolk at just such a shop, Harris & Harris in the pretty old wool town of Clare, to launch the summer issue and the latest of the Slightly Foxed Editions, Adrian Bell’s Silver Ley (see p.13).

Slightly Foxed Issue 47: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

It’s hard to believe autumn is here already. But the days are shortening, the air is growing brisker, and gradually the city is coming to life again as people trickle back after the long summer break. London is back in business, and it’s all go here in the Slightly Foxed office, with the latest of the Slightly Foxed Editions and Slightly Foxed Cubs arriving from the printers, and some new projects afoot.

Slightly Foxed Issue 48: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

By now most of us have probably begun the often rather agonized run-up to Christmas – the worry about what to buy for whom and where to find it. For Slightly Foxed readers, we suspect books are likely to feature somewhere in that list. Quite recently we read a piece by The Times columnist Jenni Russell bemoaning the fact that so many disappointing books by well-known writers are ludicrously overpromoted these days. Publishing, she wrote, ‘doesn’t prioritize what’s good, it prioritizes what’s new’.

Slightly Foxed Issue 49: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

As everyone who lives here knows, spring in London doesn’t just signal daffodils in window boxes and budding trees in squares. It signals building projects. The whole city seems to be in a state of upheaval – ‘streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up . . . piles of scaffolding, and wildernesses of bricks’. That sounds like today, but in fact it’s Dickens in Dombey and Son describing the coming of the railway to Camden Town. London is forever changing and it’s certainly doing so now around the Slightly Foxed office in Hoxton Square – still fortunately a small haven of quiet, though only a few minutes’ walk from the gleaming office blocks of the new ‘Tech City’ rising around Old Street tube station.

Slightly Foxed Issue 50: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

We had quite a celebration for our tenth anniversary in 2014 and now this summer we’ve reached what feels to us like another significant milestone – our 50th issue. You could say Slightly Foxed has reached middle age, but it still has a spring in its step and we enjoy putting it together as much now as we did when four of us sat round the kitchen table (one of us holding a baby who is now at secondary school) and planned the first issue. One of our somewhat irrational fears at the time was that we might run out of books to write about, and people to write about them, but the reverse has been the case. We know from the steady stream of suggestions arriving from contributors inside and outside the literary world that there are still countless unusual and fascinating books to discover. That’s another enjoyable aspect of editing SF: the proof, if one were needed, that you don’t have to be a ‘writer’ to be able to write.

Slightly Foxed Issue 51: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

After the events of the past few months, we must admit that, though extremely cheerful and optimistic, we’re also feeling a bit ruminative here in the office. Somehow the timeless and civilizing things we hope Slightly Foxed stands for seem more important than ever at a moment of change like this. We hope, anyway, that with the arrival of this autumn issue you can relax, draw the curtains – actual or metaphorical – and, as one of our American readers recently described it, ‘breathe a sigh of relief and slip into a world of thoughtfulness and good humor’.

Slightly Foxed Issue 52: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

The lights in the Slightly Foxed office are staying on a little later now in the run-up to Christmas. Anna, Olivia, Katy and Hattie, our newest member of staff, have been in overdrive, dealing with subscriptions, purchases and enquiries while Stanley, the new Slightly Foxed puppy, who has put poor Chudleigh’s nose terribly out of joint, snuffles around among piles of brown paper parcels containing the latest of the Slightly Foxed Editions. As always it’s hard to believe another year is almost over and a new one’s about to start.

Slightly Foxed Issue 53: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

Spring, and it’s precisely thirteen years since the first issue of Slightly Foxed appeared. Then of course we had no idea of what SF would become – more of a friendly worldwide fellowship of readers than simply a magazine. Many of you have been with us from that first issue, and our subscription renewal rate is unusually and cheeringly high. As we frequently tell you, it’s your loyalty and enthusiasm that keep us going, and this year we’ve decided to express our appreciation to you in a more concrete way.

Slightly Foxed Issue 54: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

The trees are in full deep green leaf now, making a small oasis of Hoxton Square, while not fifty yards away the traffic roars past along Old Street. New regulations to cut down air pollution in London are on the way we learn, but now the fumes hang heavily in the summer air as we make for the office, dodging people coming in the other direction who seem to be talking to themselves but are actually on their mobile phones. As Jane Austen’s great hypochondriac Mr Woodhouse observes, ‘Nobody is healthy in London, nobody can be.’ For many of us these days it’s a hurrying, worrying world.

Slightly Foxed Issue 55: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

News came recently that sales of printed books have grown for the first time in four years while sales of ebooks have declined. ‘It would appear that there remains a special place in the consumer’s heart for the aesthetic pleasure that printed books can bring’ the chief executive of the Publishers’ Association is quoted as saying.

Slightly Foxed Issue 56: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

From the start, we were keen that Slightly Foxed should feature not only contributors familiar from other book pages but also the voices of people who could write but who didn’t think of themselves as writers – people outside the literary world, who had other equally interesting kinds of experience, and for whom the written word was just as important. We’ve come to the conclusion that this describes many of our readers, judging from your sparky entries to the writers’ competitions we’ve run in the past. So, now the dark evenings have closed in again, we think it’s a good time to run another one.

Slightly Foxed Issue 57: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

So, spring again, and it seems a good moment to report on what might be called the greening of Slightly Foxed. We’ve always been keen to be green and during the past year we’ve worked hard at it, replacing our plastic-lined padded envelopes with more eco-friendly cardboard packaging and looking into switching our office paper to a more environmentally friendly brand called Cool Earth.

Slightly Foxed Issue 58: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

For some months now the office in Hoxton Square has been ringing to the sounds of hammering, banging, drilling, and tools dropping on to scaffolding, and we’ve often struggled to hear one another speak. If you build an extension in London today it can usually only go up or down, and our freeholder is adding an extra couple of storeys. We’re told the agony is nearly over and now it’s summer we’re looking forward to coming out of forced hibernation and opening the windows.

Slightly Foxed Issue 59: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

‘For weeks the trees had been heavy-laden with tired green leaves,’ writes BB when autumn arrives in Brendon Chase, ‘but now! What glory! What a colour ran riot in the underwood, how sweet and keen became the morning air.’ This is the season when ‘a new zest for living stirs within the blood, [and] adventure beckons in every yellowing leaf’. And sure enough, here at Hoxton Square, we’re in a decidedly adventurous mood.

Slightly Foxed Issue 62: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

Here in the office, summer is when we try to relax a little, draw breath and catch up with the things for which there isn’t normally time. This year Jennie and Anna are further improving the website and putting on to the index our entire archive of contributions to past issues, so if you are a subscriber, any piece we’ve ever published will soon be available for you to read. Meantime we two will be settling down to some quiet reading in our search for unusual and outstanding memoirs to add to the list of Slightly Foxed Editions. We always welcome your suggestions, so if you have a favourite memoir that is now largely unavailable, do get in touch. There are plenty of forgotten memoirs out there we find, but few have that indefinable voice that makes them unique, and it’s a real joy when we come across one.

Slightly Foxed Issue 63: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

September has crept up on us; it won’t be long before we’re thinking about Christmas (our new festive foxed card, the fifth in the series, is now out) and here in the office there’s that familiar, excited beginning of-term feeling of things about to happen.

Slightly Foxed Issue 64: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

Was there ever a moment when a good book seemed more essential? And not just because Christmas and the annual search for presents has come round again. Comfort, instruction, amusement, escape, a new perspective – whatever it is you’re looking for as a steadier in unnerving times, it’s all there in books.

Slightly Foxed Issue 65: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

It’s spring again, and a bit of news that feels cheering in today’s disordered world reaches us via an unsolicited email from ‘the world’s leading market intelligence agency’. It seems that the number of Brits who bought a print book was up last year from 51 per cent in 2018 to 56 per cent. The main reason people gave was that they prefer physical books to reading on devices. E-books certainly have their uses, but there are very particular experiences attached to the reading of a physical book, particularly a second-hand one – its look, its feel, its smell, its history as evidenced by the clues left on it and in it by previous owners. Every physical book, like a person, tells a story of its own in a way no digital book can, however convenient.

Episode 17: Margaret Drabble: A Writer’s Life

The Slightly Foxed Podcast

Dame Margaret Drabble joins us at the Slightly Foxed table as we celebrate her life in writing. From taking up her pen in the 1960s as a young mother alone in her kitchen to feeling part of a movement with Nell Dunn, Margaret Forster and Edna O’Brien, to editing The Oxford Companion to English Literature without the help of a computer and eschewing the Booker Prize, Margaret Drabble sees writing as both an illness and a trade, finding black humour in ageing and joy in jigsaw puzzles along the way. And we uncover whatever happened to the elusive novelist Elizabeth Jenkins in this month’s reading from the magazine’s archives.

‘Jonathan Phillips is a significant talent . . .’

Suzi Feay, 2019 Prize Judge

‘There could be no grander narrative than the story of Sultan Saladin and his counter-Crusade. Jonathan Phillips’s thoroughly absorbing biography takes on a period and an individual of daunting complexity and strangeness, weaving a tale worthy of a leader who proved inspirational to both East and West. The Life and Legend of the Sultan Saladin is grippingly written, wonderfully researched, and most of all, very relevant to today . . . Jonathan Phillips is a significant talent.’

Jonathan Phillips wins The Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize for The Life and Legend of the Sultan Saladin

We are delighted to announce that the winner of the Biographers’ Club Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2019 is Jonathan Phillips for The Life and Legend of the Sultan Saladin.

Love, War and the Countess | Presents for Mothering Sunday & Other Occasions

With Mothering Sunday approaching we thought our readers might appreciate a few bookish present ideas – for a mother, a fellow booklover or yourself – beginning with the latest in our series of limited-edition cloth-bound pocket hardbacks: Hermione, Countess of Ranfurly’s To War with Whitaker.

Bookshop of the Quarter: Spring 2020

Sam Read Bookseller is a small independent bookshop situated in the heart of the Lake District in Grasmere, Cumbria. William Wordsworth lived in Grasmere for many years and called it ‘the loveliest spot that man hath ever found’. The same can be said of the bookshop itself. We were delighted to learn more about life at Sam Read’s from bookshop owner Elaine Nelson and add to our reading lists thanks to recommendations from her fellow booksellers.

Time for Rhyme

Clare Morrall on the Ladybird books of nursery rhymes

There’s a picture in The Third Ladybird Book of Nursery Rhymes of a small, nervous boy in knickerbockers appearing before a man of authority: ‘I do not like thee, Doctor Fell,/ The reason why, I cannot tell./ But this I know and know full well,/ I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.’ It’s a curious little thing, but somehow very pleasing. It rhymes, there’s a clear, easy rhythm behind the words and we’re familiar with the sentiment. In short, it’s a typical nursery rhyme.

Jeremy’s Progress

Helen MacEwan on Hugh Walpole’s Jeremy books

My grandparents’ books were ranged in a deep alcove by the fireplace, a shadowy and mysterious recess that invited exploration. During visits in school holidays, I read my way through those faded hardbacks and ever afterwards associated their authors with the thrill of exploring that dark corner. The pleasurably fusty smell of the pages seemed to me the smell of an epoch, of the generation of my grandparents, born in the 1890s. Over the years I made the acquaintance of the writers they had grown up with – Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett, Hugh Walpole.

1 Mar 2020

Prophesying War

Paul Brassley on Elizabeth Wiskemann, The Europe I Saw

I enjoy reading thrillers. I might like to claim that literary fiction is my constant companion, but for most of the time it isn’t – the novels that Graham Greene described as his ‘entertainments’ give me far greater pleasure than his more serious books. Similarly, when my work as a historian took me to the period between the First and Second World Wars I found that Eric Ambler’s thrillers, written at the time, effectively captured the contemporary atmosphere, just as do Alan Furst’s more recent books. Both explore the impact of the interwar struggle between fascism, communism and democracy on innocent individuals, men who find their lives tossed about on the great waves of history. But always men. What about the women?

Walden-by-the-Sea

Richard Platt on Henry Beston, The Outermost House

It is a typical winter night on California’s central coast: the rain has been drumming on the roof, the dogs, happy and dry, are curled up in their beds, and my wife and I are in our bed, propped up on a pile of pillows, books in hand. I’m attempting with mixed success not to shake the bed with repressed laughter brought on by P. G. Wodehouse. My wife, having put aside the ever-present New Yorker magazine, is giving her undivided attention to The Outermost House by Henry Beston.

A Frank Look at History

Andy Merrills on Gregory of Tours, The History of the Franks

I am a book annotator. Of course I never write in the margins of library books, and I wouldn’t dream of marking books lent by a well-meaning friend: I’m a book annotator, not a sociopath. But a pencilled note or punctuation mark in the margin of my own books is a form of ownership, a tiny graphite beacon for future browsing and (on occasion) an aid to concentration. Most of these notes are unobtrusive – a line here, an asterisk there – but there is one book that I own which is annotated to the point of deranged excess: the Penguin Classic by Gregory of Tours, entitled The History of the Franks and translated by Lewis Thorpe.

1 Mar 2020

Cover Artist: Slightly Foxed Issue 65, Kelly Louise Judd, ‘Spring Foxes’

Kelly Louise Judd

Kelly Louise Judd is an illustrator who lives in the mid-western United States. She is inspired by flora, fauna and folklore, and has a deep appreciation of the Arts and Crafts movement. Her illustrations have been featured in botanical and children’s books, and magazines, and on natural product labels. When she is not working she can often be found outdoors tending her garden or simply staring at plants.

Dog’s-eye View

Rebecca Willis on Alexandra Horowitz, Inside of a Dog

Inside of a Dog was in the New York Times bestseller list for over a year and completely passed me by because, like the baby books, you don’t need it until you’ve got your own. The author, Alexandra Horowitz, is uniquely qualified for the ambitious task of getting inside the bodies and minds of another species. Her CV includes a BA in philosophy and a PhD in cognitive science studying dogs, plus earlier stints as a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster and a fact-checker for the New Yorker. And, it perhaps goes without saying, she’s a dog person: in the Acknowledgements section at the end of the book, the dogs come first

Choppy Waters

Melissa Harrison on Robert H. Thouless, Straight and Crooked Thinking

Dishonest or ‘crooked’ arguments are nothing new, but recently our fractious politics coupled with the invention of the Internet have lent them a fresh intensity, and a wider reach. Would that Straight and Crooked Thinking, written by Robert H. Thouless and first published in 1930, was now more widely read and taught in schools. This little book would not solve all our problems, of course, but it might help us see through partisan propaganda, take on unprincipled Internet warriors, persuade others honourably, defend our own beliefs effectively and (crucially) change our minds when necessary.

1 Mar 2020

A Hardy Perennial

Isabel Lloyd on Beth Chatto, The Dry Garden

The summer of 2018 was a glory – as long as you weren’t a gardener. For those of us who fret about plants, it was a season as much to be endured as enjoyed. After a cold, late spring, the weather had pulled a U-turn, swerving into an intense dry heat that lasted from June to the end of August. With 7 per cent less rain than even the summer of ’76 – still, after a whole series of climatic upheavals, the touchstone for freak British weather – it wasn’t so surprising that anything newly planted shrivelled in the furnace.

Betrayals

Christopher Rush on George Orwell, Animal Farm

I have a Russian wife. We work together – articles, talks, translations, books, to keep the wolf from the door. Sometimes, when a bigger than usual energy bill slides through the letterbox, or the car breaks down or the tax-man cometh, one of us will look at the other with a rueful grin and say: ‘The solution as I see it, Comrade, is to work harder.’ It’s a direct quotation from Animal Farm (1945) and the character we are quoting is the big carthorse Boxer, eighteen hands high, and the stalwart representative of the proletariat in George Orwell’s book.

1 Mar 2020

Gone Fishing

Mary Helen Spooner on the poems of Robert Service

A few months before his death I gave my father a copy of the Collected Poems of Robert Service, a British-Canadian poet whose long ballads he had discovered in his younger, single days while working on building sites in Alaska and Canada. He spoke often of his favourite, ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee’, about a gold miner in the Yukon who honours his dying fellow prospector’s request for cremation rather than interment in a frozen grave. Hauling Sam McGee’s body for days on a dog sled, the narrator eventually finds a wrecked boat along a lake shore and uses it as a makeshift crematorium.

Portrait of the Artist in Middle Age

William Palmer on Evelyn Waugh, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold

As The Ordeal opens, Gilbert Pinfold is a successful novelist in his late forties, but looking and feeling much older. He lives comfortably in the country with his wife and children. He does not consider himself rich but he can afford servants and good wine. Even so things are not going well. ‘He had become lazy . . . he spent most of the day in an armchair. He ate less, drank more and grew corpulent . . .’ Not surprisingly, indolence and indulgence mean that his health is not good and the lack of daily activity causes him to suffer from chronic insomnia.

1 Mar 2020

Fabulous Beasts

Alan Bradley on Christopher de Hamel, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts

Christopher de Hamel’s Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts (2016) is a joy. The binding, the layout and the lavish illustration make it a pleasure to handle before you even turn to the content, which perfectly fulfils its promise. De Hamel’s writing is not academic but vivid and entertaining, while the coloured reproductions are almost as dazzling as the fabulous beasts which so often clamber around their margins. As he says in his introduction, ‘the chapters are not unlike a series of celebrity interviews’.

Coming Home

Ann Kennedy Smith on Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne

We first meet the eponymous heroine of Brian Moore’s novel The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955) shortly after she has moved into her new lodgings. As she carefully unpacks a silver-framed photograph of her Aunt D’Arcy and a religious image of the Sacred Heart, we sense her misgivings about ‘the condition of the bed-springs, the shabbiness of the furniture and the run-down part of Belfast in which the room was situated’.

1 Mar 2020

How to Cook a Fox

T. M. Delaney on Patience Gray, Honey from a Weed

During a time when I was unable to work I read a lot, and randomly, picking up whatever took my fancy in the local bookshop. I had recently moved to an old farmstead on Orkney with enough space to grow some vegetables and berry fruit – not exactly living off the land, but an exciting departure for someone who had always lived in a town. One day I chanced upon Patience Gray’s Honey from a Weed, took it home and soon found myself fantasizing about planting olive trees – although to tell the truth I always knew that olives would never thrive in a latitude so high that it is impossible to grow wheat here.

Streets, Streets, Streets

Felicity James on the letters of Charles and Mary Lamb

I’m deep in mountain territory, with a pot noodle and a stack of Post-its in front of me. It’s past midnight, and my final undergraduate exams are just around the corner. Feverishly, between forkfuls, I’m wandering on high over hill and vale; I’m crossing the Alps; I’m brooding on the Wordsworthian sublime. Every so often, I’ll note down an Important Thought on my pink Post-its. Nature! Morality! Mountains!

1 Mar 2020

Asking the Right Questions

David Gilmour on the Far Eastern short stories of W. Somerset Maugham

Aspiring young writers of fiction wish to be stylish. For many of them style is more essential than content, perhaps more important than sincerity. They want their prose to be inimitable, like Conrad’s or Hemingway’s, so that readers might identify their authorship from a single paragraph. As a young man, I was certainly like that, even though fiction didn’t turn out to be my thing. And of course I preferred to read novels by writers who themselves had a pronounced style.

Blue Remembered Hills | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

We’re pleased to announce that we’re publishing Blue Remembered Hills by Rosemary Sutcliff in a handsome new Plain Foxed Edition. This memoir was the first title we published in our series of limited-edition pocket hardbacks all those years ago, and it’s a pleasure to make it available to our readers again.

Left Bank Memories

William Palmer on Shusha Guppy, A Girl in Paris

It wasn’t at first sight the sort of book I would choose, but there was nothing else remotely interesting on the single shelf in the charity shop. The dust-jacket showed a number of vapidly drawn images of Parisian life in pale reds and yellows. The title, A Girl in Paris, was not encouraging. But on the back was glowing praise by Patrick Leigh Fermor for a previous work by the author, Shusha Guppy. I opened it and was hooked.

The New European Best Literary Podcasts 2020

The New European

‘The associated podcast launched a year or so ago reflects the erudition, intelligence and wide-ranging enthusiasm of the magazine and its contributors.’

13 Feb 2020

Episode 16: Moving in Royal Circles

The Slightly Foxed Podcast

Biographer and academic Jane Ridley and screenwriter and novelist Daisy Goodwin join the Slightly Foxed Editors to reveal the wealth to be found in royal biographies, memoirs and historical novels. From the remarkable diaries of Queen Victoria and the extraordinary life of Empress Elisabeth of Austria to Prince Albert’s cashmere breeches, a cottage meal at Sissinghurst with the Queen Mother, and Edward VII’s many mistresses, the parade of tales about the lives and loves of royal people roams far and wide. And we go on a on a quest for Queen Mary with James Pope-Hennessy in this month’s hunt through the magazine’s archives.

Indexing on the Mekong

Julia Keay on indexing

I guess (but I don’t know, since it’s not often a hot topic of conversation) that every amateur indexer has his or her own way of working. Since our joint IT expertise would shame most 10-year-olds and certainly does not extend to using a computer’s indexing facility, my husband and I use pencil and paper. Tried and tested over the course of twenty-five indexes of varying lengths and complexity, this old-fogeyish no-tech method has served us well, but never more so than when compiling the index to Sowing the Wind, John’s twentieth – century history of the Middle East.

1 Sep 2004

Daughter in Residence

Jane Gardam on Ann Schlee, The Time in Aderra

It seems amazing that Ann Schlee’s work is not known to everyone, because she has always had her following and is still writing, but her four big novels written between the 1970s and 1996 are now out of print and hard to find.

1 Sep 2004

The Salesman Only Rings Once

Paul Willetts on Julian Maclaren-Ross, Of Love and Hunger

I hunted for his books as well as for the miscellanies and magazines that featured his work. Though his entertaining, much-quoted Memoirs of the Forties soon reappeared in paperback, the rest of his surprisingly extensive output was hard to obtain. Due to their scarcity, his books commanded prices way beyond what I could afford. When I mentioned this to a flatmate who had access to a well-stocked reference library, my friend offered to smuggle out the ones I wanted. The first was the novel Of Love and Hunger, handed over to me at a furtive rendezvous. Before returning it a fortnight later, I photocopied the entire book. Confronted by a stack of smudgily duplicated pages, I felt like a Soviet dissident poring over a samizdat volume.

1 Sep 2004

Marriage Lines

Hazel Wood on Cauvery Madhavan, The Uncoupling

It is 8 a.m. on a September Sunday in New Delhi. The garden below is still fresh and green before the heat of the day, and pigeons bill and coo on the air-conditioning unit outside the bedroom window. There is a discreet knock at the door, and a tray of ‘bed tea’ is silently placed beside us, accompanied by the morning papers. As I sip (tea with hot milk – an unfamiliar taste), I turn to my favourite section of the Hindustan Times, the ten pages of ‘Matrimonials’.

1 Sep 2004

Revelling with Ruskin

Derwent May on John Ruskin, Praeterita

John Ruskin’s Praeterita is one of the most exhilarating books I know, and I often go back to it. For most of his life the great art-critic-cum-sage was writing books to educate people. Once, when a reader told him how much he enjoyed his books, Ruskin answered, ‘I don’t care whether you enjoyed them. Did they do you any good?’ But at the end of his life, when he feared he was going mad, he felt he must abandon all the religious and aesthetic and social controversy of his life, and write a book that just recalled the happiness of his youth. The result was Praeterita – ‘past things’.

1 Sep 2004

Belated Reparation

Jeremy Lewis on Janina David, A Square of Sky

Rereading the books of one’s youth is always a hazardous business, since a magic once lost can never be regained, so I contemplated a fresh assault on A Square of Sky with pleasure tinged with dread. Not that I was that young when I read it last, back in the early 1970s: I’d turned 30, and was working as London’s most ineffectual literary agent. I much preferred memoirs and autobiographies to biographies or post-Victorian novels, and Janina David’s account of her childhood in wartime Poland struck me as a fine example of the genre.

1 Sep 2004

Not So Much a Business . . .

Hazel Wood on Eland Books

At the top of some concrete stairs, in a slightly run-down area of London near Sadler’s Wells, is a room with a magic carpet, otherwise known as Eland Books. Open an Eland book and you are miraculously transported to another time and place – imperial India perhaps, or sixteenth-century Turkey, Ireland in the 1950s, or Germany just before the Second World War.

1 Sep 2004

False Bottoms

Francis King on Wyndham Lewis, The Revenge for Love

Once met, I rarely dislike a person. But the idea of a person often fills me with dislike and even abhorrence. So it was with Wyndham Lewis. I never met him but I might easily have done so, since I often begged J. R. Ackerley, the brilliant literary editor of The Listener and a close friend of us both, to effect an introduction. But Ackerley, always oddly fearful that, if he brought any two of his friends together, he might lose both of them, did nothing.

1 Sep 2004

Well-salted

Trevor Fishlock on Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone Around the World

It is laconic and simple, non-romantic in that Slocum refuses to be a lone hero struggling against the terrifying sea. Rather, he is at home in the ocean wilderness, insisting that ‘the wonderful sea charmed me from the first’. Spray is his companion as much as a boat: ‘The Spray enjoyed many civilities while she rode at anchor.’ Revisiting Sailing Alone after more than thirty years, I was reminded of Slocum’s trick of appearing as a self-effacing guest, reading and cooking while the trusty Spray gets on with the job of sailing, holding her course with the wheel secured.

1 Sep 2004

The Chinese Book II

Susan Leiper on Chinese book format

In Issue 1, I described the tradition in Chinese books of placing an illustration above a solid block of text on each page, a tradition that I set out to revive in my Chinese cookery manual.

Leap of Imagination

John de Falbe on Colum McCann, Dancer

No book has exposed my own double standard to me more clearly than Dancer by Colum McCann. A fictional portrait of Rudolf Nureyev, told from many angles in many different voices, it opens with one of the best short evocations of battle that I have ever read, as Russian soldiers return from the front at the end of the Second World War. The picture narrows to an industrial town in the remote hinterland where a boy watches the trains come in, waiting for his father. Then we see him being handed through a hospital window to perform folk dances for the wounded; he is a prodigy, who makes even the human wrecks drinking meths draw breath.

1 Sep 2004

Imam with a Mission

Mathew J. Reisz on Rifa‘a Rafi‘ al-Tahtawi, An Imam in Paris

Rifa‘a al-Tahtawi has the strange distinction of being the only nineteenth-century Egyptian writer with his very own website. I first heard about him in a lecture by the French journalist and political scientist Guy Sorman. Sorman had just published a book on the Muslim world called Les enfants de Rifa‘a and started off by explaining the enigmatic title.

1 Sep 2004

Embarrassing but Inspiring

John Ure on John Buchan, The Complete Richard Hannay

We all remember the first novels we read of our own volition, unprompted by parents or schoolmasters: in my case these were John Buchan’s stories of the adventures of Richard Hannay. We were in the throes of the Second World War and so First World War novels had a special relevance. When, therefore, half a century later, a reviewer of one of my own books said that the narrative read like ‘something out of Buchan’ (though he may not have meant it as an unqualified compliment), I regarded it as the ultimate accolade: Buchan had been a role model and Hannay was my hero.

1 Jun 2004

In Dehra Dun

Julia Keay on Allan Sealy, The Everest Hotel

I found a copy of Allan Sealy’s The Everest Hotel in a small bookshop in Dehra Dun in northern India. It was the dust jacket that caught my eye – a pen-and-ink drawing of a pair of large gnarled feet in shabby sandals, crossed, and resting on a balcony rail. Irresistible. The bookseller peered over my shoulder. ‘He lives here,’ he said, with a wide smile of pride. ‘Did you know?’ I didn’t. I had never heard of Allan Sealy. But a local author writing about local matters, places, people? Whether it lived up to its cover or not, it was the right book to read then, and there.

1 Jun 2004

Extremely Small People

Mary Sullivan on T. H. White, Mistress Masham’s Repose

I suppose Tom Thumb in the fairy story is usually the first extremely small live person we come across. Early on we’re charmed by the miniature world of dolls’ houses, but the people in them are often lumpishly out of proportion to the finely detailed furniture and possessions they may live among – and they have no opinions, and they never eat the midget food upon their midget plates.

The Parson and the Squire

Brendan Lehane on Owen Chadwick, Victorian Miniature

Ten years ago I found myself glancing through a shelf of Canto paperbacks (in Cambridge, where the University Press publishes them), all nicely and cleanly produced, with an appealing colour picture on the front cover, and many within my preferred limit of a couple of hundred pages. Wishing I had time to read all of them and wit to take them in – Anne Boleyn’s life, the impact of Darwin, the Knights Templar – I picked out Victorian Miniature. It turned out to be a nice example of the kind of book I am talking about.

1 Jun 2004

Advice from My Father

Jonathan Self on C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

‘Everything he wrote was total bilge. Apart, that is to say, from A Grief Observed. The man was a genius when it came to describing grief. I have to give him that. If you are coming to terms with a serious loss – as I am – you can’t beat A Grief Observed. You should read it.’

1 Jun 2004

Well Dug In

Ursula Buchan on Charles Elliott, The Potting Shed Papers

Once upon a time, or until about 1960 that is, there existed a genre of horticultural literature called, colloquially, ‘the chatty gardening book’. In fact, the phrase did these books less than justice, for they were generally interesting, amusing, literary works written by educated, cultured people for the edification of an equally educated gardening readership. I collect as many as I can find in second-hand bookshops for, even if the spelling of plant names in them is sometimes archaic, they are still a pleasure to read.

1 Jun 2004

Doing a Runner

John Saumarez Smith on bookshops and bookselling

In 2002 Anthony Rota, a fourth-generation bookseller, published his memoirs of the antiquarian trade. He has known it for most of his life whereas I only came into it in 1965 after graduating from Cambridge. I was based in Curzon Street, while his shop was in Savile Row, but both of us might well have used the title of his book, Books in the Blood. In it he recalled some of the deals he had done, as well as two or three that he had notably missed, the many friends he made and the life of a West End bookshop before the era of the Internet.

1 Jun 2004

Hadrian to the Life

Caroline Chapman on Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

My first encounter with Memoirs of Hadrian was during a brief holiday in Andalusia. As I drove north from Málaga into the snow-covered hills, my husband turned to the first page. Within a sentence we were transported into the second century ad; a few pages later we realized we were traversing the very same landscape Hadrian had known as a boy. It was in the hills and forests around Seville that he learned to ride and to hunt: ‘The kill in a Spanish forest was my earliest acquaintance with death and with courage.’

1 Jun 2004

An Attraction of Opposites

Anthony Sattin on Diana Athill, After a Funeral

Ghali wrote his novel while living in poverty in Germany. The book was published in 1964 by André Deutsch and, as a result, Ghali met Diana Athill, who worked at Deutsch and is now best known for her autobiography Stet. ‘I was a sucker for oppressed foreigners, and an oppressed foreigner who could shrug off hardship in order to look at things with the humour and perceptiveness shown in his book was one whom I would certainly like.’

1 Jun 2004

Retail Therapy

Andrew Wall on Émile Zola, Ladies’ Paradise

When I was a small boy, a holiday treat would be to visit my father who, for several decades, was the advertising manager of Pontings department store, the least glamorous if most worthy of its siblings on Kensington High Street, Barkers and Derry & Toms. There were a variety of routes through the store – via Ladies’ Coats, Hardware or maybe the domed Linen Hall – leading eventually to the roof-top office where my father and his staff were enveloped in a chaos of merchandise sent up by each buyer to be advertised on the back of the Evening Standard or included in the latest catalogue. Young though I was, I became infected with a strong desire to possess things, which all but the most ascetic of us probably share. This is what makes Zola’s Ladies’ Paradise such a pleasure, even if, by the end, a guilty one.

1 Jun 2004

My Dear Maggotty Sir

Roger Hudson on John Hayes (ed.), The Letters of Thomas Gainsborough

If the figures of history are paraded before the mind’s eye, century by century, once the 1750s are reached one seems suddenly to be looking through a zoom lens. The procession of more-or-less august personages, remote and rather incomprehensible, conventionally portrayed and stiffly posed, and speaking or writing in stilted formulae, is elbowed aside by an animated and colourful crowd, all in close focus. Their faces and their pens are equally lively: here at last are men and women with whom we would like to converse, at whose jokes we could laugh, and with whom it would be our good fortune to become friends.

1 Jun 2004

The Wind on the Heath

Nicholas Bagnall on George Borrow, Lavengro

‘What’s that book that’s making you laugh so much?’ said my wife. It was my old Everyman Lavengro, still for some reason in its bright red dust jacket, now tattered and torn. It’s a reprint of Everyman’s 1906 edition and it has a curiously hostile introduction by Thomas Seccombe, who a few years later was to be given the Chair of English Literature at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. Poor George Borrow, he declared, ‘had anything but a fluent pen’, his inventive faculty was small, his style ‘peculiarly dry’, and he wrote only because he had to.

1 Jun 2004

Prang Wizard

Mike Petty on Derek Robinson, Goshawk Squadron

Goshawk Squadron, a story of the war in the air over the Western Front, is the missing link between Catch-22 and Blackadder. It was Derek Robinson’s first novel, published in 1971, and it was immediately short-listed for the Booker Prize, joining the likes of V. S. Naipaul, Doris Lessing and Mordecai Richler. The judges were no lightweights, either: Saul Bellow, John Fowles, Lady Antonia Fraser and Philip Toynbee, under the chairmanship of John Gross. Not an alternative comedian in sight.

1 Jun 2004

Holding the Pass to Paradise

Christian Tyler on V. S. Naipaul, Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey

Published in 1981, Among the Believers is the account of a journey through Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia in 1979, shortly after the Iranian revolution. Its subject, the Muslim fundamentalist revival, was not yet much of an issue inside Britain. (Naipaul made the journey again in 1995 for a sequel, Beyond Belief, but this first encounter with Islam proved to be the more revealing.)

Like everyone else, I had been shocked and baffled by the attacks on America. And although I had read a good deal of the torrent of punditry unleashed by the events of September 11, I was little closer to understanding them. Since I was in the middle of writing a book about the Muslim Uighurs of China, I snatched the paperback up.

1 Sep 2004

The Museum of Jurassic Technology

Lyall Watson on Lawrence Weschler, Mr Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder

I blame my grandmother. She was a great beach walker, scouring the coast for seashells thrown up by the Indian Ocean. She had eyes like a hawk, even at 60, finely tuned to any hint of a polished cowrie or the bright edge of a fan-shaped scallop half buried in the sand. And she was wonderfully generous, seeding our dawn searches with rare specimens left invitingly in my path.

1 Jun 2004

Landscape and the Heart

Anne Boston on the works of Lesley Blanch

‘Her whole life was spent riding at breakneck speed towards the wilder shores of love.’ Lesley Blanch’s memorable description of Jane Digby el Mezrab supplied the title of her first book and her contribution to the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations; it has passed into the language, and places the writer definitively in her chosen emotional and geographical landscape. Saturated with movement and high drama, the image is outlandish, exotic, flagrantly romantic, with a hint of opéra bouffe.

O Jackie . . .

Emma Tennant on Jacqueline Onassis

It’s 1991 and the recession is beginning to bite. Publishers’ accountants are staring at unearned balances, and reputations – for being artistic, for having introduced a ‘new voice’ or style – are about to be shown up for what they are: froth on the daydream, in the unforgettable (and pretentious) words of the French surrealist writer Boris Vian. Everywhere, writers are talking of TV opportunities – or even, as rumour has it that Paramount are about to open a London office, the true daydream, that of the Hollywood blockbuster.

1 Dec 2004

Trouble at Mill

Clive Unger-Hamilton on Sabine Baring-Gould, Cheap Jack Zita

As well as being a rattling good read, Sabine Baring-Gould’s bloodstained historical romance Cheap Jack Zita is full of coincidences that make me feel rather possessive about it. It’s set in Ely for one thing, and so am I – admittedly not quite the Ely of 1816, though reading the book, it’s surprising to see how little the place has changed in the past 200 years.

1 Sep 2004

Mining Conrad

Rachel Campbell-Johnston on Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

I once met a girl who was writing a thesis on Conrad. Her opinion of Nostromo was nothing if not passionate. ‘It’s like Conrad means to bore you to death,’ she recommended. ‘You must read it!’ So I did. I set out into the novel one morning and then kept on going for a couple of days, crouching by the coal fire of a scruffy student kitchen, staving off hunger with big basins of porridge.

1 Sep 2004

A Tuft of a Masterpiece

Anthony Perry on Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave

The term ‘masterpiece’ is often used lazily as a bit of instant praise, but the dictionary definition is actually ‘a production surpassing in excellence all others by the same hand’. So, strictly, you can only produce one masterpiece. Cyril Connolly (1903-1974) may have had this on his mind when he began his book The Unquiet Grave: ‘The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.’ He, alas, never produced a major work to earn the distinction himself, and he will mainly be remembered as the founder (with Stephen Spender) of the literary magazine Horizon and as the principal book reviewer of the Sunday Times in the period after the Second World War.

Seeds of Friendship

Tim Longville on Elizabeth Lawrence, Gardening for Love

Garden-writing is always either grimly concerned with the nuts and bolts of gardening’s practicalities or with its latest and flashiest fashions. The first kind is written by mere doers, the second by mere puffers, therefore neither is of any interest as writing. Gardening, and by extension writing about gardening, is something done better in Britain than anywhere else, certainly better than anywhere else in the English-speaking world. Wrong, wrong, and wrong again, dear reader. A single slim volume, Gardening for Love by Elizabeth Lawrence, delicately but devastatingly disposes of all those fallacies.

1 Sep 2004

Unsung Heroes

Richard Woodman on Nicholas Monsarrat, The Cruel Sea

My first copy of Nicholas Monsarrat’s The Cruel Sea was a twelfth birthday present, given to me in 1956. It was Cassell’s expurgated ‘Cadet Edition’, intended for a generation who knew little about the war during which they had been born. While Monsarrat’s publishers thought we should be acquainted with the Battle of the Atlantic, they clearly considered that we would come in our own time to adultery and what was then breathlessly referred to as ‘premarital sexual intercourse’. What mattered was access to Monsarrat’s brilliant evocation of a grim campaign at sea. I read it as I bumped into school on the Northern Line and have been haunted by it ever since.

Friends Reunited

Elisabeth Russell Taylor on Sándor Márai, Embers

Every year as many as eleven thousand novels may be published in Britain, of which only a handful amount to much. So it is all the more surprising to come across a masterpiece. Such is Embers by the Hungarian writer Sándor Márai. I found myself so gripped by this elegiac novel, so seduced by its limpid prose, that when I came to the final page I turned back to the first and began to reread.

1 Dec 2004

A Matter of Trust

Jill Paton Walsh on Jessica Douglas-Home, Once Upon Another Time

Once Upon Another Time is Jessica Douglas-Home’s account of the part she herself played in an extraordinary private enterprise which came to be known as ‘the Oxford visitors’. The story began with Julius Tomin, a philosophy teacher who had been ejected from his university position in Czechoslovakia. He continued openly, but unofficially, to teach courses for students expelled from Charles University on political grounds. He and his students were subjected to violence and harassment, and the strict control of access to books imposed by the authorities led to their losing touch entirely with the course of learning in the West. In 1979 Tomin wrote a letter to many Western universities, inviting lecturers to visit and speak at his seminars. Oxford was the only university to respond.

1 Dec 2004

The Editor Regrets

Derek Parker on the Poetry Review

Suddenly, out of the blue, one morning in December 1965, a letter arrived on the delightfully old-fashioned headed notepaper of the Poetry Society (‘Patron, Sir Compton Mackenzie, LL.D., F.R.S.L., President, Professor Nevill Coghill, M.A., F.R.S.L.’), written, but not signed, by Robert Armstrong, Secretary and Treasurer.

John Smith, it said, had decided that a four-year stint as Editor of the Poetry Review was ‘about enough’. He and Armstrong had undertaken ‘an intimate review’ of the situation, and were now writing to ask whether I might care to take on the job.

1 Jun 2005

The Price of Addle Tree

Irma Kurtz on Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

Not many pleasures attach to growing old. And as former pleasures pass away one by one, fewer still emerge, new and unrehearsed. Reading, albeit more slowly and through spectacles, remains a source of knowledge and provides the increasingly rare frisson of sheer delight. Most unexpectedly in my perilously lengthening lifetime, however, arrived the spanking new and rejuvenating joy of rereading.

1 Dec 2004

No Whingeing!

C. J. Driver on Mary Bruce Grant, A Little Bush Maid

A Little Bush Maid began as a serial, from newspaper articles which Minnie (as she was christened) Grant Bruce – a jobbing journalist in Melbourne – had contributed to the children’s page she edited. Popular demand made her editor suggest they might make a book. Though it still seems thinly episodic, it does introduce the main cast of characters: David Linton, the owner of Billabong, who had turned ‘in a night from a young man to an old one’ when his wife died; Norah herself, a tomboy and apple of her father’s eye; her big brother, Jim, away at boarding-school some of the time, an athlete and no intellectual, but straight as a die; Wally Meadows his mate, dark and cheerful, ‘a wag of a boy . . . [who] straightaway laid his boyish heart down at Norah’s feet, and was her slave from the first day they met’; Mrs Brown, the cook, ‘fat, good-natured and adoring’; black Billy, the stable-hand, whose command of English is limited to the word ‘plenty’; Mr Hogg the gardener; his sworn enemy, Lee Wing, the Chinese vegetable gardener (complete with queue, or pigtail); Mr Groom, the English storekeeper, who tries to teach Norah to play the piano by more than just ear; Murty O’Toole, head stockman; Dave Boone, one of the station-hands; Sarah and Mary, Irish housemaids; and of course the dogs and the horses, particularly Norah’s pony, Bobs. At the centre of the plot is the Hermit, whom Norah befriends and who turns out to be David Linton’s long-lost friend, an accountant wrongly accused of dishonesty, who as a consequence had faked his own death before hiding away in the bush.

Hand and Mind Together

Simon Brett on illustration

Faced with a new book, an illustrator ponders. Should the illustrations decorate the page or interpret the text? Should they interpret it scene by scene or accompany it at a distance as a visual counterpoint? Will they be simple visualizations, getting the costumes, settings and characters as ‘anyone’ would wish to see them, or a more personal interpretation? Will they be chapter headings, full pages or vignettes? How many have been commissioned, how frequently will they occur? Will their even placing coincide with illustratable moments, or will favourite scenes have to be ditched and minor ones brought forward?

Distant Harmonies

Linda Leatherbarrow on Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Music at Long Verney

Recently I was given a copy of The Music at Long Verney: Twenty Stories by Sylvia Townsend Warner. It was a revelation. Years ago, when I was a struggling art student, I read and loved her novels, but I somehow failed to discover the short stories. Many had first appeared in The New Yorker, and eight collections in all were published. I began to read, and there was the gracious world of the mind that I remembered from her novels, the lush sentences with their ravishing, tumbling clauses, delicious rhythms, exquisite imagery, painterly detail, the fantastic sense of place.

1 Sep 2004

Special Deliveries

Chris Bird on Mikhail Bulgakov, A Country Doctor’s Notebook

My favourite Russian writer-doctor is not Anton Chekhov but Mikhail Bulgakov, who describes with aching clarity the slow and at times humiliating road to acquiring what London taxi-drivers call ‘the knowledge’. (Shortly before his death from renal disease in 1940, Bulgakov wrote of medics: ‘I won’t call doctors murderers, that would be too harsh, but I will call them casual untalented hacks.’)

A Painterly Eye

Nicholas Bagnall on the novels of Theodor Storm

I first discovered Theodor Storm about eight years ago when someone sent me a copy of The Dykemaster in an excellent translation by Denis Jackson. I say excellent, not because of its truth to the original German, of which I’m not competent to judge, but because of its strong and consistently evocative English; like all good translations, it brings its own flavour to the story.

Sharks, Otters and Fast Cars

Ariane Bankes on Douglas Botting, The Saga of Ring of Bright Water

Some books arrive out of the blue and virtually save one’s life, and Douglas Botting’s biography of Gavin Maxwell was one such book for me. I was lying in my hospital bed after an unscheduled operation, and had implored my sister-in-law to bring me a novel by Trollope, as nothing had cheered me so much during a previous illness as The Small House at Allington. I had rarely felt more in need of cheering up.

Dear Dodie | From the Slightly Foxed archives: Valerie Grove on Look Back with Love

Greetings from No. 53 where we’ve been busy with subscriptions, renewals and book orders thanks to those of you who’ve been adding to your Foxed reading lists. We’re very grateful as the office is now looking shipshape and ready for the arrival of the spring quarter’s offerings in just a few weeks’ time. Before we look ahead to the new season, we’re looking back through the SF archives. This article by Valerie Grove appears as the preface to our pocket paperback edition of Dodie Smith’s Look Back with Love, in which we meet the funny, complicated, creative young reader who became a much beloved writer.

The Pick of the Pocket Editions

John Saumarez Smith on World’s Classics

For those like me who look out for, and sometimes even retain, useless knowledge, the first World’s Classic, published in 1901, was Jane Eyre; the last in the original pre-paperback series, published in 1973, was Crime and Punishment. The latter was No. 619, making the series many hundred volumes shorter than the original Everyman edition of classics, and many hundreds longer than the modern Everyman which started in 1992. If you had read even half of its remarkable range, you could consider yourself very widely read.

Books Under the Piano

Hazel Wood on Maia Press

They were also convinced that there was a niche to be filled. So they set about raising money from friends and well-wishers – not a lot, just enough to get started – and in June 2003 launched the Maia Press. The name is based on a version of their two Christian names. Maia, they later discovered, was, serendipitously, the Greek word for ‘midwife’ – an eminently suitable name for a small literary publisher.

On the Loose

Mary Flanagan on James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

To compensate for this structural flaw, I went to Athens and had the adventure I wanted to have. Then I nipped back to Rome, found a seedy pensione and holed up there until he arrived. For two days I lived on peaches and pasta and read James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room.

Baldwin’s famous novel was published in 1956 when he was becoming not only America’s foremost black homosexual writer but also a spokesman for the Civil Rights Movement. Baldwin outspokenly held white America accountable for the racism poisoning its society. He insisted that, because whites could not love themselves, they could not love their black brothers and sisters, and that they paid for their persecution ‘by the lives they led’. Yet Giovanni’s Room contains not a single black character. It is as if Baldwin is writing above race and gender in order to draw universal conclusions. The boldness of the enterprise still astonishes me.

1 Jun 2005

A Positive View of Parasites

Michele Hanson on William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples; Ian & Jennifer Glynn, The Life and Death of Smallpox

A parasite is often to be admired for its ingenuity and persistence, even if it isn’t always attractive. A friend of mine once discovered a worm in his bed. It had come from his own body and had been living there for several months, beginning its tour in the previous March, when it manifested itself by giving him a cough and a bad chest. He found this out later when researching the life of the roundworm, which had apparently completed a convoluted journey round his interior, beginning in the spring. ‘The female roundworm’, he said proudly, ‘lays a quarter of a million eggs a day!’

It is perhaps a good idea to take this sort of positive view of parasitism, because, according to W. H. McNeill, author of Plagues and Peoples, we are all parasites. ‘Most human lives’, he writes, ‘are caught in a precarious equilibrium between the microparasitism of disease organisms and the macroparasitism of large-bodied predators, chief among which have been other human beings,’ the sort involved in ‘war, plunder, enslavement, tax farming’.

Hoodwinkery and Legerdemain

Malcolm Gluck on the novels of Stefan Zweig

The one thing that five of the six Stefan Zweig books currently in print in Britain have most strikingly in common is not the author’s consistency of style but his photograph opposite the title page. The most famous of these, The Royal Game, notorious in European and American chess circles for decades, is the only one innocent of his image, the publisher preferring instead to show us a sketch of the battleground whereupon that so-called royal game is fought. The photograph in the other five books is warmly revealing. Herr Zweig’s devilish Viennese smile – as evident yet as beautifully suppressed as a maître d’s as he spins a yarn to his richest and most despised customer that really, yes truly, there are no free tables tonight – underlines a polished French moustache which is given subtle uplift by the fourth finger of Zweig’s right hand lying against his cheek. Posing thus he exudes the supremely confident air of a conjuror, a salesman of Hispano-Suizas, a hypnotherapist; definitely someone not to be trusted – and one cannot help but speculate on what his left hand is doing.

The Tortoise and the Writer

Sue Gee, in memory of Archimedes

The day before she died she was clambering over a pile of books on the floor of my study: novels used for teaching, reference books for the novel I was writing. She wasn’t used to being there. She clambered over the twentieth-century fiction, and a guide to Victorian china, in the same way she did everything: slowly, with a thoughtful curiosity, and a gaze as ancient as Greece.

Feudal Afterglow

Dervla Murphy on David Thomson, Woodbrook

It is peculiarly exciting to turn a page and find a strong personal emotion exactly distilled – an emotion hitherto believed to be one’s private idiosyncrasy. Around the age of 13 most bookish children break into verse (the literary equivalent of acne) and I then wrote a ‘poem’ about corncrakes – specifically, what their crake did to me (and continued to do until farming became agribusiness and the crake was heard no more.) On p. 282 of Woodbrook David Thomson says in a few words what I failed to say in several feverishly florid verses.

1 Jun 2005

A Past Relived

Sue Bridgwater on Alison Uttley, The Country Child

I first read Alison Uttley’s The Country Child over thirty years ago, when I was already in my twenties. I have always remembered it fondly, for it described a way of life that did not then seem so very far away. My grandmother was born in 1897 and I could still remember her stories of life on a remote Devon farm. When the book was reissued recently I read it again, this time with the eyes of a children’s librarian, wondering whether it would appeal to those brought up in very different times and from very different backgrounds.

A Modest Superhero

Clare Morrall on Captain W. E. Johns, the Biggles books

I can’t remember the moment when I decided to allow Biggles some space in my new novel, but I imagine he just turned up one day, demanding attention. An ingrained loyalty to past escapism meant that I had to take him seriously. There’s an inner store in my mind, a bag of glittery details that I’ve accumulated over the years. Biggles was probably sitting waiting for the opportunity and jumped out when I was rummaging around for something else.

Peacock’s Progress

J. W. M. Thompson on Thomas Love Peacock, Headlong Hall; Crotchet Castle

The ups and downs of literary reputations are often slightly mysterious. I still find it strange, though, that although we pay ample homage to most of the heavyweights of the nineteenth century, one of the best and liveliest of them all has been allowed to fade from view. Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866) deserves much better than that. I find his writings – sceptical, dry and sparkling with wit – as rewarding today as when I first read them many years ago.

After the Death of the Masters

Barnaby Rogerson on travel writing

Last summer the two masters of travel writing, Norman Lewis and Wilfrid Thesiger, died within a month of each other. As Britain buried the last of her explorers and the best of her travel writers, it became clear that a literary threshold had been crossed. The obituaries were unanimous in their praise of these great men, a pair of triumphant individualists who were born with a zeal to record a vanishing world.

Taking the Plunge

Sarah Anderson on Roger Deakin, Waterlog

The notion of a long swim through Britain began in the pouring rain while Roger Deakin was swimming in his moat in Suffolk. The idea became an obsession and, inspired by John Cheever’s short story ‘The Swimmer’, in which the hero Ned Merrill swims drunkenly home through a series of neighbours’ pools, he embarked on a random journey to swimming spots throughout the British Isles.

On Matters Mekong

John Keay on Alan Davidson, Fish and Fish Dishes of Laos

Scrolling idly through the SOAS Library’s subject catalogue, I must have brushed an unusual combination of keys, so activating a random function not mentioned on the options bar nor widely known to researchers. The feat has since proved impossible to repeat. But I keep trying; for it was thanks to this truly serendipitous action that up flashed a title which, for its crystal candour, can seldom have been bettered. Fish and Fish Dishes of Laos was so specific it had to be just that – a handbook and culinary guide to the fish to be found in landlocked Laos. The author was Alan Davidson, the publisher Prospect Books, the category ‘Long Loan’, and the status ‘Available’. Like a minnow into the reeds, I darted to the stacks.

When Ethel Met Sidney

Frances Wood on Ethel Lillian Voynich, The Gadfly

I have always been interested in translations, for they can affect one nation’s view of another. Thanks to Charles Dickens, Sherlock Holmes and a weepy film called Waterloo Road, for most Chinese,
London remains eternally wreathed in fog, never mind the Clean Air Acts. And translation can ensure that books long forgotten in their native place continue to thrive elsewhere.

Going West

Anne Sebba on Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

I am next to a businessman at a formal dinner. The conversation dries up after the soup. At a loss, I ask what sort of books he enjoys. Risky, I know. Either he won’t read, ‘except on planes when I buy whatever I can find at the airport’, or his answer will be as revealing as if I had asked him to tell me his life story. I am lucky. My businessman, more interested in fiction than foreign exchange, tells me, the book junkie, of a wonderful American author of whom I am ignorant. I am eternally grateful to him and still have the scrap of paper – menu on one side, ‘Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose’, on the other – which I stuffed into my tiny bag.

1 Jun 2005

Casting a Spell

Colin Martin on Gaylord Schanilec,Mayflies of the Drifted Region

Given that we’re talking in years, it is ironic that the book that stimulated this article deals with the most ephemeral entomological order, poetically described by Louis MacNeice as ‘One only day of May alive beneath the sun’. The American artist Gaylord Schanilec is illustrating and writing Mayflies of the Driftless Region, which he plans to publish in the autumn of 2005 under his Midnight Paper Sales imprint.

Marxism and Cricket

Peter Oborne on C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary

Only one masterpiece has ever been written about the game: Beyond a Boundary, by the intellectual and political agitator C. L. R. James. It is a book that transcends all other books on the subject in the same way that Sir Donald Bradman existed in a solitary eminence above all other batsmen. I don’t think that an English writer could ever have written a book of such calibre, because our literary culture has wrongly regarded sport as trivial. By contrast James treated cricket with deep moral seriousness, for in the West Indies, where he was born and bred, the game formed a central part of the culture of the islands. The most important theme of his book is how cricket created a new national consciousness which enabled the West Indies to shake off their colonial oppressors. The development of this argument confers a wonderful amplitude on Beyond a Boundary.

1 Jun 2005

News from Alpha Centauri

Derek Robinson on literary awards

I got lucky in 1971. In that year’s Booker prize I came 2nd, or so Saul Bellow, one of the judges, said. Coming 2nd, of course, was like coming 102nd; nevertheless it boosted my ego, which got a further shot in the arm when the International Biographical Centre, based in Cambridge, wrote and said they would be pleased to include my entry in their International Who’s Who in Poetry. I was flattered, but there were two problems. The book cost £18, which I didn’t have. And I hadn’t written a line of poetry.

The Orchid Man

Miranda Seymour on Jocelyn Brooke, The Scapegoat

I owe the discovery of The Passing of a Hero and Conventional Weapons to a fellow-visitor to the London Library who, shrewdly interpreting the glazed stare of a fellow shelf-crawler, urged me to make my way to English fiction and look for Jocelyn Brooke.

Brooke is known today, although not widely, for three wartime novels – The Military Orchid, A Mine of Serpents and The Goose Cathedral, which were reissued in 1981 by Secker & Warburg as ‘The Orchid Trilogy’. Unashamedly autobiographical, they use the twin devices of orchids and fireworks, subjects on which Brooke had acquired a rich store of recondite knowledge, to tell the story of Brooke’s upbringing in Kent, his years at Oxford and his experiences as a soldier posted to Italy in the Second World War.

1 Sep 2005

Edwardian It Girl

Sarah Crowden on E. Nesbit, Five Children and It

‘The small material objects that surround one’s daily life have always influenced me deeply,’ wrote E. (Edith) Nesbit in her memoir Long Ago When I Was Young. In my mother’s old nursery were several such objects – a doll’s crib, a triangular book cupboard made by my great grandfather – but the smallest and most influential was a smiling Buddha-shaped figurine: Billikin, God of Things as They Ought to Be.

Every Christmas we went to see Peter Pan at the Scala Theatre in London, a faithful restaging of the original Edwardian production, and the second major influence in this fanciful child’s life. For if things really were As They Ought to Be, fairies and adventure would surely follow. It was inevitable, then, that of all the children’s books I loved, E. Nesbit’s magic trilogy, Five Children and It, The Phoenix and the Carpet and The Story of the Amulet, would take precedence over her more famous The Railway Children or The Story of the Treasure Seekers.

A la Recherche

John de Falbe on Vesna Goldsworthy, Chernobyl Strawberries; Richard Wollheim, Germs

Halfway through Marilynne Robinson’s gorgeous novel Gilead, the narrator, John Ames, a 77-year-old preacher in Iowa, makes this observation: ‘Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience. That metaphor has always interested me, because it makes us artists of our behaviour, and the reaction of God to us might be thought of as aesthetic rather than morally judgmental in the ordinary sense.’

It is unusual for moral responses to be set aside in favour of aesthetic ones in a theological context, especially (one might think) where the context is Calvinist. The practice is more familiar, even if it often goes unrecognized, in literature. It is, for example, one of the sustaining tensions of Tolstoy’s work – Anna concludes that Karenin is a bad man immediately after being disgusted by his clammy hand. More directly than most fiction, Gilead portrays an individual trying to make sense of his life. This might also serve as a description of the art of autobiography, and I immediately found myself applying Ames’s remark to a clutch of autobiographies I had recently read.

1 Sep 2007

All the Fun of the Fair

Paul Willetts on Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

I was drawn to Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Alan Sillitoe’s 1958 debut novel, for just such unintellectual reasons. I suppose I must have been about 17 at the time. From what I remember, my sudden urge to read this two-decade-old novel stemmed from seeing the 1960 film adaptation on TV. I was also curious because it was set in Nottingham, where I’d grown up.

1 Sep 2005

A Word in Your Ear

Jonathan James-Moore on audiobooks

I am, literally, a bad reader. I have mild dyslexia and well remember, when reading Peyton Place in my youth, taking ‘sonofabitch’ as ‘sofabitch’ and thinking it was a piece of bordello furniture. I am also partially sighted and have difficulty reading in either bright or low light; and with poor peripheral vision I tend to miss the ends of lines. So the advent of audio tapes and of the Talking Book (pioneered by the RNIB) has been a splendid thing for me.

Natural the Way He Is

William Palmer on Thomas Brothers (ed.), Louis Armstrong, in His Own Words

It is a fair bet to say that, for most people under the age of 50, and those who are not jazz fans, the name Louis Armstrong is one associated – if recognized at all – with the sound of his voice (or, far worse, pastiches of it) singing ‘It’s a Wonderful World’ or ‘Hello Dolly’ on the backing tracks of commercials. A dimmer memory may come of a jovial old cove appearing in the film High Society, dueting with Bing Crosby and tooting a few notes on his trumpet. Even when Louis died in 1971, few of those who genuinely mourned the loss of a great entertainer had any knowledge of his true history or musical worth.

Voyage in the Dark

Patricia Cleveland-Peck on the novels of of Jean Rhys

Good Morning, Midnight is in fact the fourth in a series of novels that draw largely on Jean Rhys’s own life. Sasha Jansen is a lonely, ageing alcoholic who, at the instigation of a worried friend, goes to spend a recuperative fortnight in Paris, where she had lived during her brief marriage. Now she wanders the streets, ‘remembering this, remembering that’. She has been so damaged by men that when happiness is within her grasp she is unable to prevent herself seeking revenge with a futile gesture of self-destruction.

Hanging Loose

Karen Robinson on Cyra McFadden, The Serial

The time is the mid-1970s, the place is Marin County, an affluent Bohemian suburb of San Francisco, the desired state of mind is ‘mellow’. And so the scene is set for a delicious comedy of manners, in which Kate and Harvey Holroyd struggle to embrace the new Zeitgeist.

A Bad Chooser of Husbands

Hilary Temple on the novels of Angela Thirkell

Do your favourite authors have a recognizable voice, so that you can identify them from a paragraph in the same way that you identify a voice over the telephone? Angela Thirkell has just such a voice, but even so she has been out of fashion since the 1960s – partly, I suspect, because her later work had a strongly rancorous tone. I’d never heard of her until I came to weed a technical college library in the ’70s and happened upon a hardback novel with a map of Barsetshire as a frontispiece. Who was this Thirkell woman?

High Life

Sebastian Horsley on Edward St Aubyn, The Patrick Melrose trilogy

Bad News by Edward St Aubyn is, quite simply, the best book ever written about drugs. Thomas de Quincey, Charles Baudelaire, Jean Cocteau, William Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson, Irvine Welsh and Will Self may all be writers roped together like mountaineers heading for the summit, but it is St Aubyn they will find at the top. I first came across the book about five years ago. There it was, quietly glowing away on a friend’s shelf. And from the moment I picked it up I knew it was a work of perfection. It fitted my own experience as seamlessly as a silk glove.

1 Mar 2005

Mightier than the Sword

Annette Kobak on Karel Čapek, Letters from England; The Gardener’s Year

There’s an esprit de l’escalier peculiar to the writer, when your book has just gone to the printer and you hit upon something so crucial to it that you hop about for days cursing at the loss. So it is with me and Karel Čapek.

South-West Monsoon

Justine Hardy on Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family

Eight winters ago in India I fled the manila-folder-bound desiccation of Delhi for the south and Kerala. The backwaters there have a sensuality that slides about you as you enter, moving you away from the frantic buzz of life, separating you from a sense of time and place. The slowness starts to seep into your skin, spreading itself over you, drinking you in.

1 Sep 2005

A Kind of Redemption

Victoria Neumark on George Eliot, Adam Bede

I’ve been a passionate reader all my life, be it of labels on jam jars or the small print on the back of tax forms, aged copies of free newspapers left on seats on the London Underground, Peter Rabbit or Plato. Reading is more than pleasure, it’s like breathing. Generally, though, I read for aesthetic reasons (literature, to enjoy the writer’s skill), to keep up (newspapers and periodicals) or for escape (thrillers, the blacker the better). Or that was true before my mother died.

1 Sep 2005

Posh but Down-to-Earth

Ursula Buchan on V. Sackville-West, In Your Garden; In Your Garden Again

Recently, I noticed a rather irritating poster on the Underground proclaiming: ‘You never forget your first time.’ It was an advertisement for a villa holiday company – bizarrely – but the irritation I felt (since I am not annoyed by villa holidays per se) had to do with the too obvious double entendre. In fact, one does not forget the first time that one does quite a lot of things – seeing one’s name in print, for instance, or walking along Striding Edge, that most vertiginous of paths on to the top of Helvellyn – and certainly I have never forgotten the first time I read a gardening book.

A Passion for Crustaceans

Duff Hart-Davis on Richard Shelton, The Longshoreman

The Longshoreman is the story of an obsession with fish, beginning when, as a boy in the 1940s, Richard Shelton explored the streams around his home in Buckinghamshire, and continuing right through the twenty years he spent as head of the Freshwater Fisheries Laboratory at Pitlochry, in Scotland, from 1982 to 2001.

1 Dec 2004

Oedipus Schmoedipus

Michele Hanson on Ian Dishart Suttie, The Origins of Love and Hate

Eighty years ago Ian Suttie, a Scottish psychiatrist, wrote The Origins of Love and Hate, in which he fiercely criticized Freud’s theories. Freud saw human beings as ‘isolates wrestling with their instincts’, Suttie saw them as dreading isolation, ‘striving from the first to relate to [the] mother, and [their] future mental health turning on the success or failure of this first relationship’. Love was social rather than sexual in its biological function, thought Suttie, and was derived from a ‘self-preservation instinct rather than the genital appetite’.

1 Jun 2004

Made in Siberia

John De Falbe on Christine Sutherland, The Princess of Siberia

Every season a couple of wonderful biographies emerge whose reviews and sales might lead one to believe that they will stay bestsellers for ever. A year or two later they are in no greater demand than thousands of other backlist titles. Examples of this might be Amanda Foreman’s Georgiana or David Gilmour’s Curzon. Both were rightly acclaimed, but after the flurry of reviews, after Christmas had come and gone, they joined others on the shelves as definitive works on rather specialized subjects whose future sales will be steady, but modest. This is not to derogate the books: it is just what happens.

My First Gethsemane

John Saumarez Smith on bookshops and bookselling

Thirty-nine years ago I came to work at Heywood Hill’s bookshop in Curzon Street. Between school and Cambridge, I had worked for three months at Heffers, where Mr Reuben Heffer had cannily put me in the Science Department. It was the only part of the shop where I wouldn’t read the stock. This could hardly be called a preparation for the sophisticated carriage trade in the West End, and I had little inkling of what would be expected of me. At my interview with Handasyde Buchanan, Heywood’s long-term partner and my future boss, it appeared that he considered himself the doyen of London booksellers and that he was pleased that, like him, I had had a Classical education.

Maxwell’s World

Justin Cartwright on the novels of William Maxwell

A curious thing: the New York literary world is smaller than the London literary world. It also has a strange feeling of being more old-fashioned. I was edited there by the legendary Joe Fox. I don’t think he liked me, but we would have dinner at a hotel restaurant, the last place where he could smoke in New York, and talk about great writers, including William Maxwell. Joe Fox died at his desk in Random House behind a huge pile of copies of the New York Times, cigarette on his lips.

1 Jun 2004

The Trouble with Idealism

Matthew J. Reisz on private presses

It was towards the end of his long life, after revolutionalizing many other aspects of design, that William Morris embarked on his ‘typographical adventure’ at the Kelmscott Press. Though it survived for less than eight years and was wound up shortly after his death in 1896, it managed to produce 53 publications, including many of his own writings and a celebrated edition of Chaucer in a highly distinctive dark, ‘Gothic’ style. Kelmscott provided the crucial impetus for the four leading private presses considered in an excellent new series from the British Library and Oak Knoll Press.

Tooth and Claw

Rachel Campbell-Johnston on Gordon Grice, The Red Hourglass

The Red Hourglass, a debut volume by a writer called Gordon Grice, explores a fundamental premise. ‘We want the world to be an ordered room,’ its author writes, ‘but in the corner there hangs an untidy web.’ Within lurks ‘an irreducible mystery, a motiveless evil in Nature’. This was the idea that had captured the imagination of the movie director. And that was the idea that had trapped me, too, the first time I came across the book. I had picked it up from a literary editor’s review pile and started to leaf, distractedly, through it. Half an hour later, I was sitting on the floor, transfixed.

Off All the Standard Maps

Tim Mackintosh-Smith on Patrick Leigh Fermor, Roumeli

The only time I have been to Greece as it appears on the modern map was when I was barely out of short trousers. I went with that indispensable aid to travel, an aunt, and with the idea that I knew quite a lot about the place. My aorists and iota subscripts, however, were useless; that crucial moment for quoting Simonides on the dead Spartans never turned up. Even the sights were an anticlimax – bones of buildings, hordes of charabancs; the glory that was.

1 Jun 2004

Cowboys, ‘Hottentots’ and the Vietcong

Patrick Denman Flanery on J. M. Coetzee, Dusklands

Though J. M. Coetzee is now internationally fêted as South Africa’s second Nobel Laureate in Literature, his early novels remain largely ignored. His first, Dusklands, is especially worth rediscovering. Drawing a keenly observed connecting line backwards through history, it links the American war in Vietnam with the European land grab at the southern tip of Africa in the eighteenth century.

1 Sep 2005

A Perfect Nightmare

Lucy Lethbridge on Denton Welch, A Voice through A Cloud

In 1935, Denton Welch – then an art student at Goldsmith’s College – was knocked off his bike on a busy road just outside Bromley. He spent over a year in hospital and was permanently weakened by his injuries. He died thirteen years later at the age of 33, leaving behind him a few strange but compelling books – all of which obsessively pick over Denton’s recollections of his life before the accident. They culminate in A Voice through a Cloud, a nightmarish account of his months in hospitals and convalescent homes in southern England. He died before he finished it and it ends, with poignant abruptness, in the middle of a paragraph, with Denton sitting, uncertain and in pain, in his doctor’s car which is parked outside a bungalow in Broadstairs.

Northern Lights

Penelope Lively on Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams

Arctic Dreams is much more than a travel book; its subtitle is Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape, which causes one to raise an eyebrow. Desire? What does the man mean? To be honest I am still not too sure, but by now I am sufficiently beguiled by its author not to care too much. Suffice it that he takes you on a journey to black seas in which float icebergs the size of cathedrals, to the campsites of Inuit who died fifteen hundred years ago, and to endless plains where snow geese rise like twists of smoke; that he conjures up for you the intimate presence of narwhals, polar bears, seals, whales, muskoxen.

1 Dec 2004

The View from Denestornya

Ruth Pavey on Miklos Banffy, The Writing on the Wall: The Transylvanian Trilogy

Count Miklos Banffy’s Transylvanian Trilogy is a long novel about the follies, beauties and shortcomings of Hungarian society in the decade leading up to the First World War. He wrote it during the 1930s, when the disastrous outcomes of that war were still developing. Nostalgia may have been an active ingredient of this project, but Banffy’s purpose was to record rather than gild what had been lost. One of his conscious motivations was to help future Hungarians understand their past.

1 Mar 2005

An Odd Source of Comfort

Harriet Sergeant on Alan & Irene Taylor (eds.), The Assassin’s Cloak

Books that have a profound effect on your life are usually books that you read young, but I only recently discovered The Assassin’s Cloak: An Anthology of the World’s Greatest Diarists. Nevertheless its impact has been startling. It caught me at that moment in middle age when you realize that the only thing ahead is death, but there it sits on my bedside table to provide comfort, exhilaration and much amusement.

Ancient Worlds

David Gilmour on Rosemary Sutcliff, The Lantern Bearers

I was thus apprehensive, for my sake as well as my children’s, when I encouraged them to read Rosemary Sutcliff. I wondered whether I would still be drawn to her ancient worlds, her vanished races among the Caledonian Forest, her harpers and her war hosts, her bonfire festivals of Lammas and Beltane, her mead horns at Saxon feastings, her evocations of the last of Roman Britain.

I need not have worried. The magic was still there. In his pantheon of literary heroes and heroines, Giuseppe di Lampedusa reserved the highest places for the authors he called creatori di mondi. Rosemary Sutcliff was such a writer, a creator of worlds, lost worlds, often worlds of lost causes, of the departing legions, of Arthurian Britain, of the last stand of the Lakeland Norsemen against the knights of William Rufus. But they are not simply worlds of battle-axes and war horns. Her imagination encompassed the natural world, a feeling for its rites and a knowledge of its workings. Some of her most beautiful passages describe the changing of seasons, the ways of wolf packs, the flights of wild geese, the solitudes of the east coast marshes. And no one (except perhaps Kipling) has handled the death of a devoted dog better than she did in Dawn Wind.

The Novel that Escaped from Dartmoor

Anthony Perry on plagiarism

In 1963 a convict serving a four-year sentence in Dartmoor for car theft thought he would write a novel. He called his book Young and Sens

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