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Issue 36

1st December 2012

Slightly Foxed Issue 36: From the Editors

It seems, as they say, only yesterday that we were telling you Slightly Foxed would be moving – in fact it was in 2004 that we moved from our original ‘office’ round the kitchen table of Gail’s home in Canonbury to the family’s new home in Clerkenwell. For eight years we roosted gratefully at Dickinson Court, gradually expanding, like the proverbial cuckoo, until we’d virtually taken over; turning the spare room into a post room, filling every available alcove with back issues and filing trays, and the hall with bicycles and parcels of books.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
A Late Victorian Afternoon

A Late Victorian Afternoon

They seemed reasonable enough requests. Don’t lie on the bed naked in case passing servants catch an eyeful. Also, in mixed company, could he try to swear only in French? Modest pleas made by Theodore Watts-Dunton to the poet and ex-libertine Algernon Charles Swinburne when they first set up home together. It was 1879 and Swinburne’s relish for brandy and flagellation had reached a critical point. In the nick of time, Watts-Dunton, the gallant walrus-moustached solicitor-turned-author, had plucked his friend from the depths and carried him off for a spot of detox in Putney.
SF magazine subscribers only

Comfortable Words

To find the Book of Common Prayer among the collection was a surprise. To discover the name of Kurt Hahn – the founder of Gordonstoun and originator of Outward Bound – stamped on the inside cover, an even greater one. There was the intriguing, if minor, question of how a book of Hahn’s had found its way into Robert Weltsch’s library, but that may not have been so odd: Hahn was also part of the German-Jewish diaspora in Britain, even if not connected to the Prague circle (although he was descended from a Grand Rabbi of Prague on his mother’s side). Weltsch had been director of the Leo Baeck Institute in London, whose purpose was to recover the history of the German Jews; no doubt Kurt Hahn had been interested in its work. He probably contributed to it, perhaps providing a memoir of how he had protested against Hitler’s assumption of power in 1933, been briefly imprisoned, struggled to keep his boarding-school at Salem going through the first year of the Third Reich, and then, recognizing the impossible, left the German tyranny behind and moved to Britain to re-found his school in a new setting.
SF magazine subscribers only
A Glorious Contradiction

A Glorious Contradiction

Writing one’s autobiography involves a certain audacity: the presumption that one has a story to tell, that one can tell it engagingly, that there will be publishers willing to publish, readers eager to read and, in the dark reaches of the night, benign reviewers. But a life told in five volumes when the subject is but ‘nearing fifty and the grey hairs are beginning to show’, and is generally regarded as a second-rate author? Step forward Sir Osbert Sitwell, to enthusiastic applause.
SF magazine subscribers only

Mother’s Familiar

My parents had no interest in books. Having survived the Second World War, they found everything they needed in each other, and in their north London suburban home with doors they could lock, in a location free from falling bombs. For my father, it was ‘real life’ that mattered, so the daily and evening newspapers were sufficient; and my mother, as ever, deferred to him. They possessed between them a couple of telephone directories, an ancient Thorndike dictionary used by my father for his daily crossword, and the Radio Times, which my mother insisted on calling ‘the television book’, and that was it. Or so I thought.
SF magazine subscribers only
The Tortoise of Total War

The Tortoise of Total War

I don’t suppose anyone who buys Slightly Foxed can forget the sheer, joyful, all-absorbing intensity with which we read as adolescents; but it took a remark of T. S. Eliot’s to bring home to me the pattern of it. Young people, he observed, seldom explore a large number of authors: instead, they tend to seize on a handful of favourites, and try to read everything they ever wrote. For me, one of those authors was Evelyn Waugh: when I came across Decline and Fall in my early teens, I wanted to immerse myself for ever in his hilarious, anarchic world where the names alone were enough to bring on fits of helpless laughter. Lady Circumference and little Lord Tangent – not even Dickens could match that combination.
SF magazine subscribers only

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