Articles & Extracts

The Getting of Wisdom

‘If only people knew about Dorothy Whipple, I feel their lives would be so enriched,’ I remember the founder of Persephone Books remarking thoughtfully when I interviewed her for a profile of the firm for the very first issue of Slightly Foxed. And how right she was. It took me a long time – almost twenty years in fact – to catch up with Dorothy Whipple, and although I have enjoyed her fiction, which is compulsively readable, it is her childhood memoir, The Other Day (1936), that has touched and entertained me most.
Meet the Plantagenets

Meet the Plantagenets

I was 6 when I was given the new Puffin edition of Rumer Godden’s The Dolls’ House (1947). ‘This is a novel written about dolls in a dolls’ house,’ it begins. It was the first novel I’d ever read, arriving just at the point where I’d cracked the secret pleasure of reading to myself. We lived in Newcastle then, by the railway line. By that time, I had three younger siblings. It must have been one afternoon, when the others were downstairs, that I went up to the bedroom with my book to be alone. As the eldest I carried a certain weight: I was expected to set an example, to be grown-up, responsible. But I also got to do the first things first: first, most memorably, to read a book on my own, to make the leap, unaccompanied and unmediated, into that pocket of time and space, that dream-concoction of light and heat and air, which was – though it rose inexplicably from inside me – an entry to another world.
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The Art of Hiding Art

The Art of Hiding Art

Blanquette is as pretty as a picture, prettier than any of Monsieur Seguin’s previous goats. Her eyes are as soft as a doe’s and her beard resembles that of an army corporal. Her hooves are black and glossy, her horns are beautifully striped, her fleece is as white as mountain snow. She lets Monsieur Seguin milk her without making any fuss. She is adorable, but she is not happy. She does not wish to spend her life tethered to a stake in a paddock. When she tells Monsieur Seguin of her yearning to be set free and to go gambolling in the mountains, he claps his hand to his forehead and says, ‘Oh no, Blanquette, not you as well! Don’t you know there’s a wolf up there who’ll eat you like all my goats before?’
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An Antidote to Self-pity

An Antidote to Self-pity

‘Where am I?’ a soldier asks Pamela Bright in the first line of Life in Our Hands (1955). ‘In a field hospital,’ she replies, and moves on down the line of beds to the next patient. And that is all we know for the first ten pages of this book. It is three o’clock in the morning, ‘the very bottom of time’, and her ward is filled with wounded men. Some can be saved. Some, like Tom Malone, his liver ripped in two, cannot. He mumbles the Lord’s Prayer, cries out for his mother. Bright administers morphine, holds his hand, feels shame at the futility of her care.
A Modest Proposal

A Modest Proposal

Two Puffins are in front of me, picked almost at random from my bookcase. And by Puffins I mean Puffin books, represented by that cheerful little bird on the spine which was for my formative reading years pretty well a guarantee of a good read. Eusebius the Phoenician by Christopher Webb was published in Britain by Puffin in 1973, The Dancing Bear by Peter Dickinson in 1974. Both captivated me; both satisfied the story-craving in the way a good dinner settles a hungry stomach.
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The Loss of Innocence

The Loss of Innocence

I had been reading Philip Larkin’s poetry for years before, quite recently, I decided to have a look at his novels. I knew he had written a couple in his early years: Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947). I knew too that, in their Oxford days and for some while after, Larkin saw himself as primarily a novelist, while his friend Kingsley Amis regarded himself as primarily a poet (how wrong they both were). What I did not know was that, of Larkin’s novels, the second, A Girl in Winter , far from being an early misfire, is, well, a bit of a masterpiece.
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Frivolity, Filth and Fortitude

Frivolity, Filth and Fortitude

Among the excesses marking the dying days of the Bourbon ancien régime before it was swept away by the French Revolution was a craze for ridiculous hats. These structures elevated already flamboyant society coiffures to a level bordering on lunacy. Constructed from materials such as papier-mâché́, feathers and silk, they were worn to mark con- temporary events, from the death of a fêted individual to innovations such as ballooning. However, in a crowded field of eccentricity none could match the Duchesse de Lauzun who entered Mme du Deffand’s salon sporting an ‘entire tableau consisting of a stormy sea, ducks swimming near the shore and a man with a gun sprouting from her head. Above, on the crown, stood a mill with the miller’s wife being seduced by a priest, while over one ear the miller could be seen leading his donkey.’
SF magazine subscribers only
Mooching Around With Maigret

Mooching Around With Maigret

Fifteen years ago I set out to invent a fictional detective to lead a series that I hoped would stretch to half a dozen novels. The great imperative was to come up with a character I could live with, a sort of notional flatmate whose habits, tics and jokes I would still be able to tolerate over a span of five or six years. To date Titus Cragg and I have cohabitated more than twice as long, and I still have no inclination to ask for his keys and show him the door.
SF magazine subscribers only
The In-Between Years

The In-Between Years

Nicholas Fisk (1923–2016) is a half-forgotten name now, and his memoir Pig Ignorant is a wholly forgotten book. It deserves not to be, and he deserves not to be. Fisk was a bestselling children’s writer through my own ’70s and ’80s childhood and was described by one critic as ‘the Huxley-Wyndham-Golding of children’s literature’. But if he is remembered now, it’s for his science fiction and only vaguely, and only by people about my age. There’s the Bradburyesque alien invasion horror Grinny (see SF no.78) and its sequel You Remember Me , the disconcerting genetic-engineering story A Rag, a Bone and a Hank of Hair , and Trillions , in which tiny, collectively intelligent alien particles fall to earth like snow. In his most memorable stories the surface appearance of the world masks something darker and stranger. There’s a world behind the world.

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