Issue 29

The Sound of Raindrops

The Sound of Raindrops

About a thousand years ago, at a time when literary fashion in the courts of northern Europe had not progressed much beyond the coarse and bloody exploits of Beowulf, in another court a Japanese lady made notes for a startlingly different kind of book. Instead of mead halls and swashbuckling warriors, Sei Shōnagon focused upon such delicate things as the exact colour of a silk robe, the sound of raindrops at night when one is expecting a lover, the accuracy of a quotation from a poem – upon trivia, in fact. Yet the book she assembled from these scraps of sensibility is by any standards a triumph, as a vivid portrait of a person and of an almost unimaginably civilized society. It is also an unexpected pleasure to read.
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Hoppy Rides Again

Hoppy Rides Again

A favourite photograph of one of my grandsons shows him astride his rocking-horse, wearing one of my old hats, a rifle and a pistol in his tiny hands and the reins between his teeth – a miniature copy of John Wayne in the iconic scene from True Grit, in which he challenges the outlaws to draw their guns and face him. As soon as I saw it, I realized I had infected him with my lifelong obsession with Westerns, on screen and on the page. I thought: ‘If that child says “Fill yore hands you sonsabitches” I’m in trouble.’
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Comfort and Consolation

Comfort and Consolation

Faced with the prospect of moving into a new eco-house at the bottom of our garden I have begun to realize that I must downsize my library – which is what I like to call it: a collection of many books would be more accurate. But the name doesn’t matter: the sheer number of books is the problem. I can’t resist adding to them, even though, as I am now in my late 70s, I shall never have the time to read them all; yet the thought of having to live without them is unbearable.
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Seeking an Oasis

We come to war from many different directions. My own experiences are probably similar to those of some Slightly Foxed readers: a father who survived, just, serving in the trenches in the Great War (which he never talked about); an older brother who served in North Africa and Italy in the Second World War (which he hardly ever talked about); and childhood memories of men filling sandbags, of crouching in the cellar during air-raids, of the blackout and rationing, and the night we thought Hitler had landed in our small Worcestershire town, like something out of Dad’s Army.
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The Fatal Gift of Phrase

In the age of the common man, said Malcolm Muggeridge, we all want to be uncommon, and they don’t come more uncommon than Gore Vidal, a writer for whom the term sui generis might have been coined. Quickened by a sense of mischief and a sense of justice, Vidal has been a thorn in the side of the American Establishment for more than sixty years. Pithy, trenchant, a lifelong enemy of cant, he is the embodiment, over there, of what Sir Maurice Bowra called the Immoral Front – subversives whose aim is to question everything and respect nothing.
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Scandal at School

Scandal at School

Among the jumble of postcards, newspaper clippings, maps and to-do lists that cram the walls around my desk is a school photograph. The occasion was the annual fair at which a group of us had commandeered the brightly coloured parachute used for junior school games. The photograph shows four girls – my friend Tanya, in white prefect’s blazer and sash; two of our younger protégées, all drooping knee socks and jauntily loosened school ties; and a child of 6 or 7 fresh from a visit to the face-painting stall – huddled together on the grass beneath the billowing parachute in the moments before the tent collapsed around our shoulders. I don’t remember the seconds after the shutter snapped (I was the one taking the picture) but the image records a golden period, at once bittersweet, anxious and exhilarating, in the weeks before Tanya and I left school for good.
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A Terrifying Business

A Terrifying Business

My erratic education included one year at a technical college, before it was agreed I leave on the grounds that I was incorrigibly idle. It was 1964, I was 16 and after three suffocating years at a previous school I was not going to waste my time and new freedom by studying A levels when I could do more exciting things, such as being thrown out of pubs for drinking weak beer under age. But although student and college were glad to see the back of each other, I had one regret - no more English lectures with genial Mr Butler, the single teacher for whom my rigid code of sloth made an exception.
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Biophilia for Beginners

Biophilia for Beginners

Until my early twenties, I had never really thought about Darwin. I was halfway through a doctorate in biology by then, so in retrospect this seems like a glaring omission. Naturally, I had thought about Darwinism – or more accurately, I simply knew about it. Darwinism was at the centre of a scientific ‘theory of everything’ instilled early on by my parents, both professional biologists. There were very few childish ‘why’s’ in our household that couldn’t be answered by either Darwin or Newton. Laws of nature stood in for any conventional religion, with perhaps the advantage that they didn’t seem irrational or intrusive, so as I grew up, I never felt moved to reject them. Such was the happy upbringing that could produce a student of biology who had never given a serious second thought to what has been called ‘the greatest single idea in the history of thought’: that living species are not God-given and immutable but are capable of changing and evolving under the pressure of natural selection.
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Goodbye to Berlin

For a year or two in the Sixties, I would regularly stop off on my way home at the W. H. Smith by Earls Court station. Catering for so many well placed commuters, it was a reliable showcase of current literary taste while tending to skimp slightly on the Barbara Cartland end of the market. In 1968 they gave a decent showing to The Naked Civil Servant by local reprobate Quentin Crisp; but that was nothing compared with the previous year’s razzmatazz display of Adam Diment’s much-hyped first book, The Dolly Dolly Spy.
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