Articles & Extracts

Boxing Days

Boxing Days

The jab that crunched into my nose before I had my guard up was a fine lesson in the importance of being prepared, but it is not a fond memory. Getting punched rarely is. A. J. Liebling, however, treasured the blow he received from ‘Philadelphia’ Jack O’Brien, an American pugilist already in his prime when Liebling was born in 1904. Liebling saw the punch as a precious relic, linking him to O’Brien’s era and the eras before that. Just think of the greats who had punched O’Brien, the greats who had punched them and so on back in time. Liebling was proud to be part of such a passage of punches.
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Fifty Years On

Fifty Years On

If, as I did, you came of age in the Sixties, then one rite of passage you may have undergone was reading John Fowles’s bestselling Bildungsroman, The Magus (1965), which provided, it was said, an experience ‘beyond the literary’ – in my case, a vicarious ego trip. How flattering to have so much time and energy expended in order to make you a better person! Even the indignant narrator, Nicholas Urfe, who compares what he’s been through to ‘exposure in the vil­lage stocks’, can scarce forbear to cheer: ‘that all this could be mounted just for me’.
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Dem Bones

Dem Bones

Some thirty years ago in the National Museum of Guyana, amidst the geological, archaeological and historical artefacts in their display cabinets, there existed a carefully cordoned-off empty space. It consisted of a plinth covered in plush red fabric surrounded by gold tasselled ropes, as if waiting for secret royalty. I am not sure how many other countries set aside a space in their national museums for their ghosts, spirits and jumbies. Not many, I imagine. Behind the empty space hung various plaques with detailed sociological descriptions of each spirit, itemizing its habitat, appearance, customary behaviour and even dietary preferences, an attempt by the rational with its orderly classifications and categorizations to contain or overpower these disturbing beings.
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Guilty Pleasures

Guilty Pleasures

More often than not, a shelf of books is a statement about the person we wish to be. We carefully arrange the titles so our friends will gain a favourable impression of us, thinking that we are cultured, sensitive, politically aware or part of the rebellious avant-garde. Meanwhile, the books we really enjoy, our guilty pleasures, are hid­den from sight. It’s nice to know that not much has changed in 500 years. Apparently, scholars in Ming-dynasty China did much the same. The books on display in their studies were the Confucian clas­sics they had been forced to read to gain high positions in the civil service, while the books they really enjoyed were hidden under their mattresses. And these, quite often, were pulp detective novels.
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Read, then Cook

Read, then Cook

‘If you can read, you can cook.’ This was the simple, revolutionary philosophy behind Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961 and 1970), written by Julia Child, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle. Even with sixty years’ hindsight, the book’s lasting success is remark­able. In two volumes and running to well over a thousand pages of precise technical French cuisine it was launched on a nation of home cooks who knew little about la belle France, yet it became a runaway best-seller and catapulted one of its authors to fame.
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Lark, Hare, Stone

Lark, Hare, Stone

Memories of the British Empire may be receding around the world, but they live on in Ireland, the first and closest of Britain’s colonies. It is not hard to see why. For centuries all the techniques that would eventually be deployed to subdue various other peoples were initiated there: armed force, mass slaughter, the theft of land, economic and racial bullying, the suppression of language, enslavement, starvation. Then, as they cut their losses, the British played their final card – partition.
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A Tale of Two Villages

A Tale of Two Villages

For many people in the countryside, life just after the Second World War had not changed so very much from a hundred years before. When I was a young boy in the 1950s our family lived in a small farmhouse in mid-Wales, a couple of miles from the nearest village. We had no mains water or electricity; water came from a well through a hand pump in the kitchen; electricity was provided by a generator – when that burned out one night in November we relied on candles and oil lamps for the whole winter. There was no bathroom, only a tin bath hung on the kitchen door, and an outside privy. Neighbouring farms were much the same, and families scratched a living from the sheep dotted on the surrounding hills. The children spoke Welsh and English and sang Welsh songs on the school bus. Most people went to Chapel on Sunday. It all seemed perfectly normal and likely to last forever.
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Murder, Miracles and Myanmar

Murder, Miracles and Myanmar

As I had expected, I found the famous murder trials edited by Miss F. Tennyson Jesse on the shelves of the Law Library of the University of Victoria on Vancouver Island, but I was pleasantly surprised to discover a dozen more of her books in the main collection. It is a very young university – a mere sixty years old – and it replaced Victoria College, which itself had absorbed the Normal School, as the teacher training institute was originally known, and naturally took over their libraries. Presumably the young women preparing to be junior school teachers in the 1920s and ’30s enjoyed Jesse’s novels and plays, and so obviously did their instructors and the librarians, who of course make the real decisions about library purchases.
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Last of the Swallows

Last of the Swallows

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the perfect happiness of progeny is achieved only in the absence of their parents. As such circumstances are normally attended by certain obvious practical difficulties and disadvantages, they are to be found less in daily life than in fiction. In the twelve books of the Swallows and Amazons series, Arthur Ransome is ingenious in providing good reasons for keeping their elders and betters out of the revels of the Walker, Blackett and Callum children. In the seventh of the series he is at his most adept in placing Commander Walker in the wings but off stage until the precise moment when he is needed at the climax of the tale.
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1st June 2022

Slightly Foxed Issue 74: From the Editors

Summer is here and the square outside has come alive again. There are people walking their dogs or enjoying the sunshine at tables outside the café opposite the office. It’s a peaceful scene, but it’s impossible to forget that far away though ever-present is this year’s ugly backdrop of the war in Ukraine, not to mention the violence and suppression of free speech in so many parts of the world. We’ve never taken ourselves too seriously at Slightly Foxed, seeing it as essentially a place where readers can relax, enjoy good writing and, we hope, have a laugh occasionally. But in these deeply worrying and isolating times, it’s the comforting sense of fellowship and connection through books that readers tell us they get from Slightly Foxed which seems especially important.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
Another Self | Chapter I: Tobias and the Angel

Another Self | Chapter I: Tobias and the Angel

My world was the only real world. Nothing about it seemed incongruous; and those events which happened in it were never inconsequential. Its relation with the great outside world was tenuous. By which I do not deny that a few of my notable fancies were sparked off by momentous contacts with the unreal, outside world. For of course they often were. A riveting story or a glamorous present might do the trick, and set the magic working. On the other hand the pattern of events in my world was often outrageously disturbed by trivial demands made by the unreal world, such as to eat tapioca pudding, to wash my teeth, or to go to bed when I felt disinclined.
Conundrum | Chapter 7: Rescued – a grand love . . .

Conundrum | Chapter 7: Rescued – a grand love . . .

Love rescued me from that remote and eerie capsule, as it rescued me from self-destruction, and everything they say about love, in dicta sublime as in lyric abysmal, is demonstrably true. I have loved people with disconcerting frequency all of my life, but I have enjoyed one particular love of an intensity so different from all the rest, on a plane of experience so mysterious, and of a texture so rich, that it overrode from the start all my sexual ambiguities, and acted like a key to the latch of my conundrum.
Still Life | Starting from the one-storeyed wooden shop . . .

Still Life | Starting from the one-storeyed wooden shop . . .

Grove Hill, later Grove Hill Road, another way up to my home, on the contrary, had a great deal to offer, starting from the one-storeyed wooden shop – little more than a shed, with a flat roof covered over in some sort of tarpaulin – of R. Septimus Gardiner, Taxidermist, his window displaying his skills: red squirrels on their hind-legs eating nuts against a background of branches and foliage; sinister-looking pike, with whisky-drinking eyes, submarine colours and scales, the Terror of the Deep, lurking against a background of yellowing rushes and trailing pale green river-weeds; a woodcock with little glass eyes . . .
A Year in Barsetshire

A Year in Barsetshire

In the spring of 2020, amidst the early devastation of Covid-19, I found myself unable to read. I was grappling with the after-effects of an accident when the pandemic struck, so my concentration was already fractured by the time the streets fell silent. Deprived of the consolations of print, one April afternoon I pressed play on the first chapter of the audiobook of Anthony Trollope’s The Warden as I left the house for my daily walk. I did so without much expectation that the noise would do anything other than provide a mild distraction from the exigencies of the day, but within minutes the cathedral close of Barchester had opened up before me and I was hooked. What follows is an account of the year I spent among the inhabitants of Barsetshire, and of the solace I found in the connected stories of the Barchester novels.
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Masefield’s Magic

Masefield’s Magic

I was 8 when I first read John Masefield’s The Box of Delights – in the late 1960s, in the high-ceilinged classroom of a Victorian-built school in East London. I had not long been reading ‘chapter books’ as we called them, and this was the longest, most challenging and most sophisticated one I had yet encountered – and by far the most rewarding. It’s not easy to convey the peculiar atmosphere of it: scary but funny; fantastical but believable; lyrical yet down-to-earth; grotesque, even nightmarish in parts, yet told in a friendly voice. Years later, when I had forgotten most of the details of the actual story and characters, the feeling of it remained with me, like the lingering memory of a dream.
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