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GBS and Me

My enthusiasm for George Bernard Shaw dates from 1950, when I was 12. On my way home from school it was my habit to buy a copy of the Star, one of London’s three evening papers, principally to check the cricket scores. One afternoon the front-page splash carried the bold headline: BERNARD SHAW DEAD. At the age of 94 he had fallen off a ladder while pruning his cherry tree, and he did not recover. I reasoned that a man who warranted front-page treatment must be a writer of consequence, so I resolved to discover more.
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A Boy in a Tattered Coat

A Boy in a Tattered Coat

The book was called The Star-Born. Its first chapters were about owls, especially one called Eldrich, which sounded to me like the shriek of doom heard before a death. The owls were frightening: hunting, nipping on the neck, tearing open and gobbling down a succession of soft small rodents whose long tails dangled from their beaks, and whose tiny bones made an ossuary of the ruins where they nested. The next chapters were filled with creatures who were nebu­lous and filmy: Leaf Spirit, Air Spirit, Water Spirit and Quill Spirit, who lived among the dripping ferns and sunbows of the gorge of the River Lyd.
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The Man Who Enjoyed Everything

The Man Who Enjoyed Everything

If Sir Edward Marsh appears in a few literary reference books, it is as the editor of five anthologies of Georgian poetry published between 1911 and 1922, the idea for which came from Rupert Brooke. As Brooke said, they ‘went up like a rocket’; ‘Yes, and came down like a stick,’ Marsh ruefully recalled. But his name pops up unexpectedly – usually just as ‘Eddie’ – in many memoirs and biographies of twentieth-century figures from Henry James to Ivor Novello, Somerset Maugham to David Cecil, D. H. to T. E. Lawrence. And he was for a quarter of a century the close friend and assistant of Winston Churchill.
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Misadventures in the Rag Trade

Misadventures in the Rag Trade

It remains one of the more surprising facts of life that the intrepid traveller Eric Newby, who by the time I knew him had the weatherbeaten cragginess of a man only happy when halfway up the Hindu Kush, should have carved out an earlier career astride the lower slopes of haute couture. Everyone has to start somewhere, however, and he put his first reluctant footprint on the fashion world as hapless gofer in the family firm of Lane & Newby, ‘Mantle Manufacturers and Wholesale Costumiers’ . . .
February News: Collar as Dawn. Back as Snowdrop.

February News: Collar as Dawn. Back as Snowdrop.

Meteorologically speaking, we are still deep in mid-winter, but here at Slightly Foxed the new quarter waits not for the weather, so we are delighted to announce that it is now, officially, spring. Thanks to the sterling work of Tracey and her team at Smith Settle printers in Yorkshire, the new issue of the quarterly: No. 57, ‘A Crowning Achievement’, is now on its way to readers all around the world. Whether you make the most of the inclement weather and curl up in a favourite chair to devour it immediately or wait for a fair day for some al fresco reading, we do hope you’ll enjoy its typically eclectic collection of good writing and good reading . . .
High Society, Low Life

High Society, Low Life

Marcel Proust’s novel Remembrance of Things Past begins, as I discussed in an earlier piece (SF no. 56), with the narrator recalling the times he spent as a boy in his great-aunt’s house in the village of Combray. There were two walks the family regularly took from the house, one in the direction of a property owned by a family friend, M. Swann, and the other in the direction of an estate owned by a very grand aristocratic family with local connections, the Guermantes. The Way by Swann’s, the first walk, is the name of the first book of Proust’s novel. The Guermantes Way, the second walk, is the name of the third, and with it the narrator and reader enter a new world, of dukes and duchesses, princes and princesses, and all the high society of Paris’s fashionable Faubourg Saint-Germain.
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A Crowning Achievement

A Crowning Achievement

Like so many Slightly Foxed readers, I was hooked by Netflix’s first series of The Crown. The lavish production, rumoured to have cost £100 million, the understated acting, the meticulous detail and the cut-glass accents – all gave each episode a sense of stunning authenticity. Claire Foy, in the role of the Queen, was immaculate and as compelling as anyone can be driving a Land Rover in twinset and pearls, and the series as a whole introduced us to a world of privilege and glamour at the very heart of the British establishment which is usually shrouded in secrecy.
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Somerset Garden

Somerset Garden

‘She rises still. A region must be found unhaunted by birds, that else might profane the mystery. She rises still; and already the ill-assorted troop below are dwindling and falling asunder. The feeble, infirm, the aged, unwelcome, ill fed, who have flown from inactive or impoverished cities – these renounce the pursuit and disappear in the void. Only a small, indefatigable cluster remain, suspended in infinite opal. She summons her wings for one final effort; and now the chosen of incomprehensible forces has reached her, has seized her, and, bounding aloft with united impetus, the ascending spiral of their intertwined flight whirls for one second in the hostile madness of love.’

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