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Streams of Consciousness

Streams of Consciousness

Life had been kind to the Thoreau brothers. They were fit, healthy, enjoyed nothing so much as their time together in the open air, and having successfully taken over the Concord Academy, the local private school where they themselves had been educated, they had cause for optimism. They were finding their place in the world. It was a time to breathe deeply and venture forth with confidence. These would be among the happiest days of Henry Thoreau’s all-too-brief life, and would inspire A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849).
SF magazine subscribers only
Sprouts and Parsnip Wine

Sprouts and Parsnip Wine

Early one morning, late in July, the villagers of ‘crack-brained Brensham’ woke to a remarkable spectacle. There amid the customary colours of furze and wheat was a seven-acre field that ‘had suddenly become tinctured with the colour of Mediterranean skies’. Nothing like it had ever happened before, so that the villagers caught their breath at the sight of this miracle: a great, vivid patch of cerulean ‘so clear and pure that it made one think of eyes or skies’ . . .
Travelling Fearlessly

Travelling Fearlessly

In 1992, I started working for a strange but beguiling organization. The Royal Society of Literature was, in those days, housed in a huge, dilapidated mansion in Bayswater, and it was there that its Fellows gathered to raise a farewell glass to my predecessor. They were an elderly, rather moth-eaten bunch, but one stood out – a strikingly handsome younger man in a velvet jacket. Somebody introduced me: ‘This is Colin Thubron. He’ll be a great support to you.’ And so he proved – when he was in London.
Hair Today and Gone Tomorrow

Hair Today and Gone Tomorrow

Five or six summers ago, I was browsing in a shabbily genteel second-hand bookstore in a university town somewhere in the middle of the United States. The shop had a substantial stock of fiction, a generous and eclectic supply of non-fiction and the sort of haphazard shelving policy which actively demands exploration. I cannot now remember which section I was in when I discovered Reginald Reynolds’s extraordinary Beards: An Omnium Gatherum (1949). I’m pretty sure it wasn’t in fiction, but beyond that it could have been anywhere . . .
SF magazine subscribers only
Melancholy but Marvellous

Melancholy but Marvellous

The capital of nowhere – could anywhere be more tantalizing? For those of us increasingly blasé or wary about visiting ‘somewheres’ the world over, many of them the target of hordes of other tourists hellbent on pleasure (and often compromising the particular qualities of their destination in the process), nowhere sounds the ultimate place to go. And, as it turns out, this place does have its own geographical co-ordinates, and is even accessible by public transport. It’s just that on arrival you may experience a sudden sense of dislocation, an overwhelming wistfulness for an elusive past, and a present that feels curiously like limbo. For in the words of its chronicler, Jan Morris, in Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (2001), the Mediterranean port ‘stands above economics, or tourism, or science, or even the passage of ships, or if not above them, apart from them’.

Man on the Run

In 1990, I watched a drama series on the BBC called Never Come Back. It was a superb Second World War thriller with a fine cast including James Fox, Nathaniel Parker and Martin Clunes. Then about a year later, while browsing in my local bookshop, I pulled a volume entitled Never Come Back by John Mair off the shelf and realized that the television series must have been an adaptation of it. The book had obviously been on display in the shop window for a long time because its front cover was badly faded. I almost put it back on the shelf. Thank goodness I didn’t, because Never Come Back (1941) has since become one of my favourite novels.
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A Snatch of Morning

A Snatch of Morning

I bought David Cecil’s Life of William Cowper, The Stricken Deer, at a time, in my early twenties, when I was starting to devour literary biography, my preferred reading ever since. I was by then familiar not just with Elizabeth Bennet and Jane Eyre and David Copperfield but with Jane Austen, the Brontës and Charles Dickens. Most of my literary friends were in the nineteenth century: the eighteenth was largely unfamiliar territory. All I knew about William Cowper was that he had been a favourite poet of Jane Austen’s.
SF magazine subscribers only
May News: A kind of Englishness

May News: A kind of Englishness

Greetings once more from No. 53 Hoxton Square. The turn of the quarter is almost upon us and we have the pressing – and cheering – business of good reading to report. The cream pages of the summer issue of Slightly Foxed, No. 58: ‘A Snatch of Morning’, have rolled off the printing presses up at Smith Settle, been pressed, nipped, trimmed, sewn and bound, and then lovingly stuffed into handsome (and ecologically friendly) sturdy brown envelopes and bundled into postbags to begin their journey around the world . . . And we’re off to Brensham with our 42nd Slightly Foxed Edition, The Blue Field, and a snippet of Sarah Perry’s lovely preface by way of introduction.
Cover Artist: Slightly Foxed Issue 58, Debbie George, ‘Forget me not’

Cover Artist: Slightly Foxed Issue 58, Debbie George, ‘Forget me not’

Debbie George has been a painter for over twenty years. Her work is a celebration of her passion for flowers and the objects with which she surrounds herself. She finds inspiration in many forms, ranging from ceramics and plants to books and wallpaper, textiles and landscape. Assembling flowers or objects within the foreground of a painting and setting them against a variety of backdrops, Debbie builds up layers of paint that create a wonderful luminosity and depth.

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