Articles & Extracts

An Unusual Case

An Unusual Case

Richard Cobb’s memoir A Classical Education (1985) opens on a spring day in 1950. He is at St Lazare station in Paris awaiting the arrival of an old schoolfriend he’s not seen for fourteen years. Cobb has spent much of that time on the Continent, first as a soldier in the war and then as a historian researching various French archives. His friend, by contrast, has been shut away in a Dublin asylum for the entirety of those years, serving out his sentence for the murder of his mother.
U and I and Me

U and I and Me

I hadn’t read much John Updike when I picked up Nicholson Baker’s book on him during lockdown; but then neither had Baker when he wrote the book. This is one of the novelties of U and I. Where most non-fiction strives for mastery of its subject, this little book pursues that ‘very spottiness of coverage [that] is, along with the wildly untenable generalizations that spring from it, one of the most important features of the thinking we do about living writers’. The result is a funny, profound meditation on what writers actually mean to readers as opposed to what academics tell us they should mean.
SF magazine subscribers only
1st September 2023

Slightly Foxed Issue 79: From the Editors

New contributors to Slightly Foxed sometimes ask us which issue their piece is going to appear in and the truth is, we’re usually hard put to tell them in advance. One pleasure of SF is that we’re not bound by publication dates for new books, so we rarely plan a piece for a particular issue but instead welcome good contributions and select from what we have. We’ve always worked on the bran-tub principle that we’d like readers to dip in and find something unexpected that they wouldn’t normally have been looking for. But despite this, each issue does seem to come together with a particular atmosphere and character of its own.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
When I Was a Little Boy | Chapter 4: Suitcases, Corsets and Curls

When I Was a Little Boy | Chapter 4: Suitcases, Corsets and Curls

Dresden was a wonderful city, full of art and history, yet with none of the atmosphere of a museum which happened to house, along with its treasures, six hundred and fifty thousand Dresdeners. Past and present lived in perfect unity, or rather duality, and blended and harmonized with the landscape – the Elbe, the bridges, the slopes of the surrounding hills, the woods, the mountains which fringed the horizon – to form a perfect trinity. From Meissen Cathedral to the Castle Park of Groszsedlitz, history, art and nature intermingled in town and valley in an incomparable accord which seemed as though bewitched by its own perfect harmony.
The Wine Lover’s Daughter | Chapter 1: Thwick

The Wine Lover’s Daughter | Chapter 1: Thwick

My father was a lousy driver and a two-finger typist, but he could open a wine bottle as deftly as any swain ever undressed his lover. Nearly every evening of my childhood, I watched him cut the capsule – the foil sleeve that sheathes the bottleneck – with a sharp knife. Then he plunged the bore of a butterfly corkscrew into the exact center of the cork, twirled the handle, and, after the brass levers rose like two supplicant arms, pushed them down and gently twisted out the cork. Its pop was satisfying but restrained, not the fustian whoop of a champagne cork but a well-bred thwick. He once said that the cork was one of three inventions that had proved unequivocally beneficial to the human race. (The others were the wheel and Kleenex.)
Last Waltz in Vienna Extract | Part Two | Youth and Freedom

Last Waltz in Vienna Extract | Part Two | Youth and Freedom

Kirtag in St Gilgen was a very different occasion, and though my memories of that Day of Atonement visit long ago were somewhat vague, it still seemed impossible to believe that this was the same building. Austria’s best stage designers had changed it into a very life-like imitation of that famous holiday resort not far from Salzburg. They could not, even if they wanted to, put a good part of Vienna under water and bring the St Wolfgang lake into the Konzerthaus, but the White Horse Inn, the lakeside hostelry known to operetta lovers all over the world, had been reconstructed inside the building, so had the village square, maypole and all, and on various levels there were farms with real cows and horses in their stables, country-inn gardens with buxom waitresses in old-style peasant costumes serving wine and beer, and any number of bands from the genuine ‘tara-ra-boom-de-ay’ to modern ones playing the swing hits from Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers films by Irving Berlin and Cole Porter, evergreens that have outlasted my youth.
Adrian Bell | The Hungry Gap | A Countryman’s Spring Notebook Extract

Adrian Bell | The Hungry Gap | A Countryman’s Spring Notebook Extract

‘April is the cruellest month,’ stated a famous poem in its first line. T. S. Eliot, who wrote it, was as townee a poet as ever lived, and hadn’t the faintest idea of the literal truth of it for the countryman. ‘Breeding lilacs out of the dead land’ he goes on, and generally making things look deceptively pleasant in a doomed planet. Not since Browning have poets exuded cheery notions, unless it were G. K. Chesterton in a pub.
Having the Last Word

Having the Last Word

According to a paperback column in the Daily Telegraph (15 August 1988) I greatly admired Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger (1987) and thought its closing pages ‘among the most moving I have read in years’. I wasn’t alone; the novel had already won the rather more significant distinction of the Booker Prize the year before, marking the high point of Lively’s much-honoured career in both adult and children’s fiction. So why, given my proclaimed enthusiasm, did I not read another word of hers for more than thirty years? Impossible to explain, though I made good the deficit recently, having spent the first lockdown reading about a dozen of her books in close succession.
SF magazine subscribers only
Arrows of Revelation

Arrows of Revelation

Towards the end of Jane Austen’s Emma (1816), the heroine Emma Woodhouse has a moment of blinding clarity. Throughout the novel she has been treating her old friend and neighbour, Mr Knightley, as little more than a familiar sparring partner. But as she learns that her friend Harriet is harbouring dreams of marriage with him, the scales fall from her eyes. ‘It darted through her, with the speed of an arrow, that Mr Knightley must marry no one but herself!’
SF magazine subscribers only
Bore-Hunting in Dublin

Bore-Hunting in Dublin

Most fiction writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries know the form and understand that they will meet the same fate: good reviews for a first novel, a larger advance for the second, severely reduced advances for any subsequent volumes, poor sales, the casting adrift by their publishers, full-time jobs in cardboard box factories or part-time jobs in academia, then oblivion. My own fantasy, as an ageing cuckoo nesting in various universities in the early part of this century, was to find a beautiful and energetic student to front my works so that I could enjoy a new career by proxy. Perhaps not: he (or she) might have been praised for their ability to satirize the politically regrettable thought patterns of men and women of previous generations, but surely the trick would only work once. Perhaps the answer would be to dream up a suitable pen name and start afresh.
SF magazine subscribers only
In Johnson’s Footsteps

In Johnson’s Footsteps

‘We’re thinking of moving,’ announced our son one evening last year. ‘To Lichfield.’ Lichfield! The name was music to my ears. I have long had a soft spot for that little gem of a cathedral city, once the ecclesiastical capital of Mercia, now a delightful Staffordshire market town. I would be more than happy to follow the son, daughter-in-law and three of the grandchildren to Lichfield (and my wife, less familiar with Lichfield, would follow them wherever they went anyway).
SF magazine subscribers only

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