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A Spy in a Courteous Enemy Camp | ‘You would find first, I think, if placed in the situation yourself, that it was extraordinarily interesting . . .’

A Spy in a Courteous Enemy Camp | ‘You would find first, I think, if placed in the situation yourself, that it was extraordinarily interesting . . .’

In 1972 James Morris booked a return ticket to Casablanca and underwent what would now be called gender reassignment surgery. Soon afterwards Jan Morris wrote a book about what it had felt like to live – or try to live – for forty odd years with the absolute conviction that she was a woman trapped in a man’s body, and how this agony had finally been resolved. That book was Conundrum and when it was published in 1974 it caused a sensation.
Extract from Giving Up the Ghost | Part One: A Second Home

Extract from Giving Up the Ghost | Part One: A Second Home

It is a Saturday, late July, 2000; we are in Reepham, Norfolk, at Owl Cottage. There’s something we have to do today, but we are trying to postpone it. We need to go across the road to see Mr Ewing; we need to ask for a valuation, and see what they think of our chances of selling. Ewing’s are the local firm, and it was they who sold us the house, seven years ago. As the morning wears on we move around each other silently, avoiding conversation. The decision’s made. There’s no more to discuss.
‘I was still only a boy, still unformed, when walking into the colonel’s tent . . .’ | Extract from Conundrum

‘I was still only a boy, still unformed, when walking into the colonel’s tent . . .’ | Extract from Conundrum

I was still only a boy, still unformed, when walking into the colonel’s tent on the banks of the Tagliamento river in Venezia Giulia, I found the commanding officer of the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers rising to his feet to greet me. Yet I was entering a man’s world, the world of war and soldiery. I felt like one of those unconvincing heroines of fiction who, disguised in buskins or Hussar’s jacket, penetrate the battlefields to find glory or romance: and the colonel’s civilized gesture of welcome, to an undistinguished and unpromising reporting subaltern, seemed to me a happy omen. So it was.
‘The exhausted Meaulnes has the impression of a house long since abandoned – broken windows, missing doors . . .’ | From the Slightly Foxed Archives

‘The exhausted Meaulnes has the impression of a house long since abandoned – broken windows, missing doors . . .’ | From the Slightly Foxed Archives

Greetings from Hoxton Square, where we’re checking proofs of the next issue of SF, carefully unpacking early copies of the next hand-numbered Slightly Foxed Edition (No. 71: Nigel Slater’s Toast, decked out in a delicious toast-brown cloth), preparing for the release of Episode 53 of the Slightly Foxed Podcast on 15 April, and plotting a June trip to an intriguing little bookshop in Cambridge to toast the forthcoming quarter.
The Start of Something Big | ‘We are on our way to Oxford, the dazzling publisher and I, to visit a woman as old as the century . . .’

The Start of Something Big | ‘We are on our way to Oxford, the dazzling publisher and I, to visit a woman as old as the century . . .’

It is a Saturday morning in 1981 and Jennie Erdal is embarking on a journey with the man she calls ‘Tiger’, the flamboyant figure at the centre of Ghosting, the strange and gripping story of the twenty years in which she became his ghost writer, pulling the wool over the eyes of reviewers and turning him into the literary lion he had always wanted to be.
‘The plumage is a wonder to behold . . . ’| Extract from Ghosting

‘The plumage is a wonder to behold . . . ’| Extract from Ghosting

So strange and exotic is he that he could be a rare tropical bird that you might never come face to face with, even in a lifetime spent in the rain forest. The plumage is a wonder to behold: a large sapphire in the lapel of a bold striped suit, a vivid silk tie so bright that it dazzles, and when he flaps his wings the lining of his jacket glints and glistens like a prism. He sees that I am startled and he smiles. He takes my hand in his and lays it on the silk lining. You want to touch? Go on, touch! It’s best Chinese silk. I have only the best.
Bookish gift ideas for the maternal figures in your lives, be they mother or grandmother, aunt, teacher or friend

Bookish gift ideas for the maternal figures in your lives, be they mother or grandmother, aunt, teacher or friend

‘Always at night it came on; first the black panther under my bed, then wolves crowding in the shadowy corners of my room out of range of the nightlight, then snakes climbing up the walls. And my mother, finding that nothing else would reassure me, would spend large parts of each night carrying me wrapped in a shawl round and round the room and into all the corners, making me pat the walls to show myself that there was nothing there’
One more day of clear, if frozen, sun | A Countryman’s Spring Notebook Extract

One more day of clear, if frozen, sun | A Countryman’s Spring Notebook Extract

The yew tree appeared as wafers of snow to our waking eyes, when March dawned. The rest of it was lost in darkness. The prospect of March is usually (as Johnson said of a friend’s second marriage) ‘the triumph of hope over experience’. A visitor brought us some daffodils that had been raised under glass: ‘daffodils that take the winds of March with beauty’. Although these had never felt a breath of wind, they seemed to create a magic breeze about them, by their petals flung back from their jag-edged trumpets. Their perfume filled the room with spring, after our winter of scentless maidenhair and helichrysum.
Dorothy: The Highlights

Dorothy: The Highlights

It’s always risky to buy a second-hand book online, especially when the condition is described as ‘fair’, which embraces a wide variety of possible faults. When Dorothy Wordsworth’s Continental Journals, 1798–1820 (1897) arrived, a quick flick through revealed that the text on many pages had been made hideous by vivid green highlighting. This was annoying but not sufficiently so to make me return the book. In fact I’ve found that annotations can sometimes add to one’s enjoyment, as in the case of a copy of George Borrow’s Lavengro, chosen from the library of an old friend who had recently died. Reading the pencilled annotations in his familiar hand, it was as if I was reading it alongside him, enjoying again his questioning mind and gentle intelligence, bringing him back to life for me for a few hours.
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