Issue 77

My Years as a Pony

My Years as a Pony

Between the ages of 8 and 11 I thought I was a pony. I was not alone: my friends were in the grip of a similar delusion. We created fantasy mounts called Daybreak or Nutmeg, then became them. We never ran when we could gallop, at all times slapping our sides for greater verisimilitude. Jumps were constructed and then scrambled over or refused with much rearing and neighing. Fortunately our brothers were still pretending to be Spitfires, so our behaviour, on the whole, passed unremarked.
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Power and the Prince

Power and the Prince

Recently, the lack of anything worth watching on TV sent me, once again, to the DVD of Visconti’s lush 1963 film of Giuseppe Lampedusa’s The Leopard (1958). If one loves a book, the idea that a film version might be in a different way as satisfactory as the original seems a sort of betrayal. But at the very least I find it impossible to reread the book without Burt Lancaster’s Prince Fabrizio, Claudia Cardinale’s ravishing Angelica and Alain Delon’s handsome, selfregarding Tancredi illustrating the narrative as a most remarkable set of lithographs might.
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Not Your Typical Courtier

Not Your Typical Courtier

In 1974, following the publication that year of his ‘self-portrait’, Another Part of the Wood, I did a feature on Kenneth Clark for the BBC World Service. This involved interviewing him at his ‘set’ in Albany, off Piccadilly, the austerity of which was mitigated by what I took to be a small fortune in paintings and miniatures on the walls. In the book Lord Clark, as he became, described his life (1903–83) as ‘one long, harmless confidence trick’, a reference to what he called his freak aptitude, apparent from the age of 9 or 10, for responding authoritatively to works of art.
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Out of the Shadows

Take two sisters, Alice and Flora Mayor, identical twins born into a comfortable upper-middle-class family in Surrey in 1872. Their clergyman father was also a professor of classical literature at King’s College, London, and their mother Jessie a talented musician and linguist. As members of a Victorian clerical family, the girls had certain duties (‘Church as depressing as usual. 2 and a half people there,’ young Flora wrote in her diary), but mostly they and their two older brothers had tremendous fun: performing amateur theatricals, skating and playing tennis, singing, writing stories, going to the theatre, and always, always reading: Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters and Mrs Gaskell.
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Oh Sir John!

Oh Sir John!

In 1976, a year remembered in the UK for its blazing summer, publication of a scabrous novel so inflamed a group of academics that they burned copies in the library at Reading University. Less delicate souls embraced the book. It won that year’s Hawthornden Prize for Literature and the Guardian Fiction Prize, garnering encomiums from reviewers who struggled to match its exuberant prose. The New York Times called it a ‘fresco of groinwork’; Time Magazine welcomed a ‘swollen, rumbustical bladder of a book . . . unstoppable as a rush of sack to the kidneys’; Anthony Burgess praised its ‘wordy divagations of a more monkish (Rabelaisian) tradition’ and included it among his 99 best modern novels.
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Political Life

Political Life

In Slightly Foxed no. 73 I wrote about the solace I found, during the first year of the pandemic, in listening to Timothy West’s brilliant recordings of Anthony Trollope’s Barchester novels. I couldn’t bear to stop listening when I reached the end of The Last Chronicle of Barset, so I followed Plantagenet Palliser and the Duke of Omnium out of Barsetshire and into the books in which they take up starring roles. Originally labelled collectively as Trollope’s ‘parliamentary novels’, today this series is more commonly known as ‘the Palliser novels’ after the family whose domestic and political fortunes form its connecting thread.
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The River and Its Source

The River and Its Source

There are two memorials to Neil Gunn in his birthplace of Dunbeath on the Caithness coast. One is a statue and the other is a squat black typewriter. The typewriter is a mid-1930s Imperial. I have never much cared for the concept of sacred relics, but if pushed I could make a case for that typewriter. It was the one on which Gunn wrote Highland River (1937), a novel so exquisitely wrought that it conferred on his native landscape the gift of immortality.
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Waiting for Posterity

Waiting for Posterity

In 1786 Richard Wynne decided to sell his estate at Folkingham in Lincolnshire and go to live on the Continent with his wife and five daughters. The sale realized £90,000 and he had investments too; his wealth, eight figures in today’s terms, meant he could lead as elaborate an existence as he wanted, and the hope was that his wife’s health would be improved by living abroad. Moreover she was French, while his mother had been Italian and he had spent part of his youth in Venice, so perhaps it wasn’t as radical a step as all that. Then his fifth daughter had been born in 1786, so he might have resigned himself to never having a male heir to inherit Folkingham.
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