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Home » Articles & Extracts » Issue 62

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20190601150541 Slightly Foxed Issue 62

Slightly Foxed Issue 62: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

Here in the office, summer is when we try to relax a little, draw breath and catch up with the things for which there isn’t normally time. This year Jennie and Anna are further improving the website and putting on to the index our entire archive of contributions to past issues, so if you are a subscriber, any piece we’ve ever published will soon be available for you to read. Meantime we two will be settling down to some quiet reading in our search for unusual and outstanding memoirs to add to the list of Slightly Foxed Editions. We always welcome your suggestions, so if you have a favourite memoir that is now largely unavailable, do get in touch. There are plenty of forgotten memoirs out there we find, but few have that indefinable voice that makes them unique, and it’s a real joy when we come across one.

20190603124922 Daniel Macklin - Pauline Melville on Jane Austen, Slightly Foxed 62

Ire and Irritability

Pauline Melville on Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

I am having another stab at Jane Austen. Friends beg me to keep trying, anxious for me not to miss what they tell me is an unrivalled view of a luminous literary landscape. I have made efforts on and off over the years and never found her to my taste. Somewhere along the line at school I passed through Northanger Abbey without retaining much impression of it. But now I have made a pledge with a friend who works at the Royal Society of Literature. I must endeavour to read some Austen and my friend will attempt to read Wuthering Heights, a book she has heretofore avoided. She suggested I start with Sense and Sensibility, so I did.

20190603123001 Anthony Wells on Clare Hollingworth, There's a German Just Behind Me - Slightly Foxed 62

Scoops of the Century

Anthony Wells on Clare Hollingworth, There’s a German Just Behind Me

Clare Hollingworth lived to the high old age of 105, spending much of her last years in the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in her adopted home of Hong Kong. Even at the age of 92 she was said to be prepared to head out to whatever hot-spot her editor might want to send her to. After reading There’s a German Just Behind Me, you’ll rather wish her editor had given her the call.

20190603112045 Peter Radford on E. McDonald Bailey, If It's Speed You're After - Slightly Foxed 62

An Olympian Effort

Peter Radford on E. McDonald Bailey, If It’s Speed You’re After

When I was a young man I was an international runner who held world sprint records and won medals in the European Championships, the Commonwealth Games and the Olympic Games. You would be right in thinking that training, allied with natural ability, had something to do with this, but it was a book, bought when I was 13, that made it all possible. That book changed my life.

20190601170812

A Burning Issue

Piers Plowright on Cesare Pavese, The Moon and the Bonfires

This is the tale of a baby, a book and a candle. The setting is the Sudan, the baby is our first-born, two-month-old Natasha, and the book is a great twentieth-century Italian novel. As for the candle . . . One may as well begin with the baby. Natasha Su-ming Sakina Plowright was born on 22 February 1966 in Omdurman, a stone’s throw from the Mahdi’s tomb, to my wife Poh Sim and me. She weighed 8lbs 6oz and was bright blue. Her nearest neighbour in the nun-run hospital was a Greek grocer’s baby weighing in at over 10lbs. We carried ours home in triumph and a Moses basket to our eccentric, edge-of-desert house, set in a garden full of mongooses.

1 Jun 2019
20190601165152

Not Your Average Englishwoman

Justin Marozzi on Rosita Forbes, The Secret of the Sahara

I first encountered Rosita Forbes atop a camel in the middle of the Rabiana Sand Sea in southern Libya. There was probably no finer way of making this unusual writer’s acquaintance. Here, deep in the Sahara, she was in her element, disguised as an Arab woman and with only a few camels and human companions between her and a nasty, lingering death. In fact it was worse than that. Apart from the natural dangers of the desert, she was passing through the territory of tribesmen who regarded this motley expedition of an Englishwoman and the Egyptian Olympic-fencer-cum-spy-cum-explorer Ahmed Hassanein Bey with profound suspicion, if not downright hostility.

1 Jun 2019
20190601164153

Uncle Vanya Drops In

William Palmer on Roy Lewis, The Evolution Man

I should read The Evolution Man, he said. He would lend it to me. I had never heard of its author, Roy Lewis, but pieced together some information about him. Born in 1913, educated at King Edward’s School in Birmingham and University College, Oxford, Lewis spent much of his adult life as a journalist working for, among others, the Economist and The Times.

1 Jun 2019
20190601161509

Extremely Likable People

Ursula Buchan on the novels of O. Douglas

In the kind of house where books are handed down the generations, the chances are that on a spare bedroom bookshelf, squeezed between Guy Mannering and Roses, Their Culture and Management, you will find a copy of one of the eleven novels written by O. Douglas. Take it to bed to read and you will quickly become immersed in the cultured, if circumscribed, Scottish middle-class life of three generations ago. Whether that appeals to you will probably depend both on your attitude to Scotland and Scottishness and on whether you enjoy a well-told if old-fashioned story where only rarely does anything very startling happen.

1 Jun 2019
20190601160403

Hoofing It

Richard Conyngham on Dervla Murphy, Eight Feet in the Andes

Unable to pedal but still able to walk, I had found inspiration in a battered copy of Eight Feet in the Andes wedged between the clothes and the spare tubes in my pannier. In the early 1980s, its author Dervla Murphy flew to Cajamarca in Peru with her 9-year-old daughter Rachel. Already a veteran of odysseys on foot, mule, donkey and bicycle, the Irish travel writer needed no justification for what came next. Putting the local grapevine to good use, she and Rachel purchased a lively young mule named Juana . . .

1 Jun 2019
20190531173230 Rebecca West by Wyndham Lewis - Rebecca Willis on Saga of the Century, Slightly Foxed 62

Mood Music

Rebecca Willis on Rebecca West’s ‘Saga of the Century’

Until I read the bit in Rebecca West’s This Real Night where one of the main characters dies, I’d never cried properly on a plane. I’ll admit to a bit of panicky sobbing during a bout of bad turbulence, but never before had I abandoned myself to full-on, uncontrollable weeping at 33,000 feet. I won’t tell you which of the characters dies, because that would be a cruel spoiler, and I am hoping to persuade you to spend time with this strange, wonderful trilogy and the eccentric Aubrey family who live in its pages. But I’m getting ahead of myself, because This Real Night is the second book in the series and – like the unfinished third, Cousin Rosamund – was published posthumously (1984 and 1985 respectively).

20190531172705 Matt Collins on H. E. Bates, Through the Woods 1 - Slightly Foxed 62

Small Is Beautiful

Matt Collins on H. E. Bates, Through the Woods

Among the books I’d assembled to help steer me through the boundless subject of trees and woodlands for a recent commission, H. E. Bates’s Through the Woods – a month-by-month account of a small copse in Kent – looked unassuming. Recommended via some unnerving algorithm of online commerce, it sat for many weeks among the accumulating pile beneath my desk. When at last I glanced through it, however, one passage brought it suddenly alive. . .

20190531165930 Tricorn Centre Portsmouth - Andrew Nixon on Jonathan Meades, Slightly Foxed 62

An Incurable Topophilia

Andrew Nixon on the writings of Jonathan Meades

For Meades is not a ‘television presenter’ at all, but rather an author who occasionally makes television programmes. His considerable written oeuvre includes fiction, memoir, reportage, cultural history, literary criticism and even a highly idiosyncratic cookbook. His specialist subject, however, is place.

20190531162842 Peter Barker-Mill wood engraving - Charles Elliott on Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore in Slightly Foxed 62

Antipodean Alcatraz

Charles Elliott on Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore

Australia was born as a jail. Not until well into the eighteenth century was Europe aware of the place, and even then nobody could see much use for it. But the British, who claimed it, had serious problems at home, principal among them being an apparent crime wave that had generated an unmanageable volume of convicts.

20190531155355

Energetic Idleness

Adam Foulds on Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift

In Nabokov’s novel The Gift (1938) the young poet Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev is solitary and gifted. A virtuoso of perception, he sees around him many small, delightful details – a shopkeeper’s pumpkincoloured bald spot; an iridescent oil slick on a road with a plume-like twist, asphalt’s parakeet – that others around him miss.

31 May 2019
20190531154221 Daniel Macklin - Laurie Graham on Lord Emsworth's Annotated Whiffle, Slightly Foxed 62

One Man and His Pigs

Laurie Graham on Lord Emsworth’s Annotated Whiffle

Many of you will already be acquainted with Clarence Threepwood, 9th Earl of Emsworth. You will know that in a life buffeted by bossy and opinionated women the Earl’s greatest consolation is his prizewinning Berkshire sow, the Empress of Blandings. P. G. Wodehouse’s Lord Emsworth is a connoisseur of pigs and his favourite book, possibly the only one he ever reads, is The Care of the Pig by Augustus Whiffle.

20190530115426 Clare Leighton wood engraving - Olivia Potts on Jane Grigson, Slightly Foxed 62

Haikus among the Pears

Olivia Potts on Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book

A Jane Grigson quotation sits on my desk. It’s written on a scrappy Post-it note; the glue on the back has picked up dust and a stray piece of cotton. It wasn’t meant to become a permanent feature, rather a scribble to remind myself to write the line somewhere more lasting, but I can’t quite bring myself to throw it away. It reads: ‘Anyone who likes to eat, can soon learn to cook well.’

20190529204915 Slightly Foxed Editions: Love and War in the Apennines & Something Wholesale by Eric Newby

A Romantic Escape

Patrick French on Eric Newby, Love and War in the Apennines

Love and War in the Apennines is a book of romantic escape, overseen by the suffering of war, which shows how it ripples out across society and into fragile human lives.

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