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Issue 77

The Girl from Apex City

The Girl from Apex City

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country (1913) is one of the most sparkling and enjoyable novels I have ever read, and I’ve read it now several times. Each time it manages to surprise and delight me. I put it in a class with Pride and Prejudice, as a book that offers endlessly renewable pleasure. That’s high praise, but I mean every word of it.

SF magazine subscribers only

A Hybrid Life

By the time she was 14 and finally settled with her family in their own house in Totnes, Devon, Katrin FitzHerbert – or Kay Norris, as she was then – had lived in nearly thirty different places and attended no fewer than fourteen schools. To have lived such an itinerant life by such a tender age would be extraordinary in itself but, to make her story even more unusual, the homes and schools were in two countries, Germany and England. And there was a further complication. The Germany where she spent the first years of her life, moving from place to place and school to school, was the Germany of the Third Reich, the Second World War and the Allied occupation. For Katrin FitzHerbert, the author of True to Both My Selves (1997), was born Katrin Olga Ethel Thiele in Berlin on 6 June 1936.

Laughter in the Library

Laughter in the Library

When, on what felt like my 800th lockdown circuit of the park, I came across a fellow-walker trying his damndest to stop his dog barking at something unseen among the trees and get it on the move again, suddenly the name Dogmatix popped into my mind, remembered from Anthea Bell’s marvellous English translations of the Asterix comic-strip stories written by René Goscinny and illustrated by Albert Uderzo.

SF magazine subscribers only

Slightly Foxed Issue 77: From the Editors

There’s something very particular about the quiet months after Christmas – a time to hibernate, turn round and generally take stock. That’s what we’ve been doing here at the Slightly Foxed office, tidying up after the Christmas rush, reviewing our plans for the coming year and watching spring gradually arrive in Hoxton Square as the daffodils begin to emerge and the cafés tentatively put out their tables.

- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

From the editors

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