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Frivolity, Filth and Fortitude

Frivolity, Filth and Fortitude

Among the excesses marking the dying days of the Bourbon ancien régime before it was swept away by the French Revolution was a craze for ridiculous hats. These structures elevated already flamboyant society coiffures to a level bordering on lunacy. Constructed from materials such as papier-mâché́, feathers and silk, they were worn to mark con- temporary events, from the death of a fêted individual to innovations such as ballooning. However, in a crowded field of eccentricity none could match the Duchesse de Lauzun who entered Mme du Deffand’s salon sporting an ‘entire tableau consisting of a stormy sea, ducks swimming near the shore and a man with a gun sprouting from her head. Above, on the crown, stood a mill with the miller’s wife being seduced by a priest, while over one ear the miller could be seen leading his donkey.’
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No Nylon Singlets

No Nylon Singlets

The first time I went to France, I was 9 years old, and we drove all the way there in my mother’s tiny Datsun. The second time, I was a teenager, and sans parents, and I kissed a boy called Sylvain who wore snow-washed jeans and a horrible white nylon vest. Ah, Sylvain. Chéri. To my knowledge, there is only one extant photograph of the two of us together. We’re sitting on a low wall somewhere in the countryside just east of Montélimar, and my face wears a rapturous expression.
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A New Angle on Life

A New Angle on Life

To save a little money for travelling before university, I took a job in the stockroom of a women’s fashion store in the nearest town. I had to be on site to receive deliveries before the store opened, which meant catching the bus that glided, spectre-like, past my rural home just before 5 a.m. most mornings. I kept watch, fully dressed for work under a quilted dressing-gown, by the window at the top of the stairs, so that I could spot the headlights between the trees and so have enough time to dash outside and flag it down with vigorous torch and arm-waving.
SF magazine subscribers only
Mooching Around With Maigret

Mooching Around With Maigret

Fifteen years ago I set out to invent a fictional detective to lead a series that I hoped would stretch to half a dozen novels. The great imperative was to come up with a character I could live with, a sort of notional flatmate whose habits, tics and jokes I would still be able to tolerate over a span of five or six years. To date Titus Cragg and I have cohabitated more than twice as long, and I still have no inclination to ask for his keys and show him the door.
SF magazine subscribers only
The In-Between Years

The In-Between Years

Nicholas Fisk (1923–2016) is a half-forgotten name now, and his memoir Pig Ignorant is a wholly forgotten book. It deserves not to be, and he deserves not to be. Fisk was a bestselling children’s writer through my own ’70s and ’80s childhood and was described by one critic as ‘the Huxley-Wyndham-Golding of children’s literature’. But if he is remembered now, it’s for his science fiction and only vaguely, and only by people about my age. There’s the Bradburyesque alien invasion horror Grinny (see SF no.78) and its sequel You Remember Me , the disconcerting genetic-engineering story A Rag, a Bone and a Hank of Hair , and Trillions , in which tiny, collectively intelligent alien particles fall to earth like snow. In his most memorable stories the surface appearance of the world masks something darker and stranger. There’s a world behind the world.
Arrows of Revelation

Arrows of Revelation

Towards the end of Jane Austen’s Emma (1816), the heroine Emma Woodhouse has a moment of blinding clarity. Throughout the novel she has been treating her old friend and neighbour, Mr Knightley, as little more than a familiar sparring partner. But as she learns that her friend Harriet is harbouring dreams of marriage with him, the scales fall from her eyes. ‘It darted through her, with the speed of an arrow, that Mr Knightley must marry no one but herself!’
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Lark Rise to Ambridge | Flora Thompson & The Archers | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

Lark Rise to Ambridge | Flora Thompson & The Archers | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

Greetings from Slightly Foxed. We’re delighted to bring news of what promises to be a fantastic adaptation of Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise, Over to Candleford and Candleford Green by the cast of the famed long-running BBC Radio 4 drama, The Archers. Over two episodes, broadcast at 3 p.m. on Sunday 1 October and Sunday 8 October, the residents of Ambridge will guide us through Flora’s memoirs of a rural Oxfordshire childhood in the late nineteenth century.
With Bold Knife and Fork | The writings of M. F. K. Fisher | From the Slightly Foxed archives

With Bold Knife and Fork | The writings of M. F. K. Fisher | From the Slightly Foxed archives

Greetings from Hoxton Square. As you all know, each issue of Slightly Foxed is a real feast of interesting and varied bookish delights, and this quarter’s issue (No. 79) is no exception. We were particularly taken with Olivia Potts’s piece on Marguerite Patten but with Cookery in Colour sadly out of print, we’ve been discussing our favourite food writing, and in particular those books being given a second life by publishers like Daunt Books Publishing.

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