Articles & Extracts

Low Life, High Art

Low Life, High Art

For most of the last fifty years, the correct way to read the Spectator was to open it at the back, flip over a few pages and find out what on earth old Low Life had been up to that week. Had he woken up in a hedge with no memory of the previous twenty-four hours, perhaps? Had he had a brush with the law, or suffered an embarrassing bodily malfunction in a public place? Had he outraged the prevailing middle-class morals of the day in some farcical manner? The purpose of the Low Life column was to give Spectator readers a weekly glimpse of the gutter; a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God insight into the life of the bohemian drop out; a sense of what happens when a man looks at polite society’s prescriptions and says, ‘Not for me, thank you.’ And a proper belly-laugh into the bargain. Two men have been Low Life’s custodians. Both are now dead. The first, Jeffrey Bernard, was the archetypal Soho barfly: cynical, self-pitying, permanently sozzled, spitting out formless but funny poison-pen letters until the booze killed him, aged 65, in 1997. He has become a figure of legend, immortalized in a stage play named after the Spectator’s frequent one-line apology when he failed to file copy: Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell.
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A Life Well Lived

A Life Well Lived

Historians of children’s literature sometimes speak of a First and a Second Golden Age. The First was the Victorian/Edwardian period, when many of the most enduring classics were written – Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Black Beauty, Treasure Island, Little Women, Peter Pan, The Wind in the Willows – and the main genres of children’s literature (fantasy, adventure, animal stories, school stories, family sagas) were established. This period is generally thought to have come to an end around the outbreak of the First World War. For whatever reasons, the interwar period produced rather less memorable children’s literature.
SF magazine subscribers only
A Consummate Professional

A Consummate Professional

I came to Cecil Beaton through Roy Strong, and Strong’s vastly entertaining diaries owe much to Cecil Beaton. In 1967, five months after he was appointed the youngest ever Director of the National Portrait Gallery, Strong made ‘juvenile jottings’ on some of the remarkable people he was meeting. The jottings became, a year later, something much more substantial. ‘Beaton’s diaries were in the process of being published at the time,’ Strong wrote, ‘and I was hypnotized by his ability to conjure up characters or a scene. His diaries were not daily, but occasional, made up of set pieces describing particular events or people . . . They were concerned, too, with a social panorama . . . It was that type of diary that I resolved to keep.’
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2nd March 2026

Slightly Foxed Issue 89: From the Editors

As we were sitting round the kitchen table recently, chewing over general thoughts about SF and plans for the year ahead, it struck us that some of our most interesting and original pieces have come to us via our Writers’ Competitions. One of our aims, when we started Slightly Foxed, was to find contributors from as wide a range of back grounds as possible rather than depending on professional journalists and published writers to fill the magazine. This policy has led us in so many interesting directions and proved that you don’t have to be a ‘writer’ to write well. It’s also become obvious from the many letters and emails we receive from all over the world that our subscribers are a fascinating bunch, well able to hold their own when it comes to putting words together.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
Extract from Love Divine | Chapter 1

Extract from Love Divine | Chapter 1

A blustery day dawns in Lamley Green, with plenty of rain in the forecast. In Holly Grove, a street of Georgian houses just off the green, curtains and shutters are being opened by sleepy residents in their dressing-gowns, some yawning, some frowning. In its basement kitchens, kettle switches are being flicked and capsules slotted into coffee machines. A dog barks. At No. 14, someone starts drilling loudly into a wall. At No. 12, the curtains remain firmly closed. Throughout the morning, the following letters will be dropped through its letterbox.
The Secret Life of Second-hand Books

The Secret Life of Second-hand Books

I was halfway through reading a novel published in 1913: cloth- covered, rust-spotted and printed on slightly spongy thick cream paper. Mightier than the Sword, a semi-autobiographical newspaper thriller, was written by a young Fleet Street journalist called Alphonse Courlander, who would die three years later in the muddy trenches of France. It isn’t great literature and I was struggling to stay engaged when, between pp.192 and 193, I found a folded piece of blue paper: a letter dated 1964, sent from a guest house in Ryde on the Isle of Wight.
SF magazine subscribers only
An Insatiable Appetite

An Insatiable Appetite

Here’s a book to relish, savour and devour. I would say digest, too, but for reasons which will soon become evident, that may be easier said than done. There is a lot – and I mean a lot – of eating and drinking to get through and, for today’s readers at least, the quantities alone, never mind the richness of the dishes consumed, and the gallons of wine, apéritifs and digestifs which accompany them, propel us into territory clearly marked ‘Completely Indigestible’. Happily, that is the very opposite of the book’s prose, which is light, delicious and verging on the addictive.
SF magazine subscribers only
A Story of Love Denied

A Story of Love Denied

During the dry, hot June of 2000 I found myself at an Edward Thomas study weekend at Madingley Hall in Cambridge engaged in an intemperate debate with a fellow who insisted on denigrating Thomas’s incoherence as a philosopher, which I felt was about as fair as criticizing Maradona’s abilities as a submarine captain. Keeping a lid on this increasingly silly exchange was the weekend’s leader, a softly spoken and impressively moustachioed poet and academic called Jem Poster. Jem was blessed with extraordinary patience and tact. He coaxed us down from our respective teetering ledges by diverting our attention towards the delicacy of Thomas’s natural imagery, a subject upon which my tormentor and I could only agree, so that in the end neither of us felt as though we had either won or lost.
SF magazine subscribers only
Telling it Straight

Telling it Straight

‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive . . .’ Well, it would be hard to argue it was a revolution, I suppose – that ‘new wave’ of English novels of my youth. But it was definitely thrilling to be reading new fiction in the late 1950s and early ’60s; and to be a young man buying those novels as soon as the booksellers would sell you them (if I remember rightly, once you were, or looked, 14) came pretty close to literary heaven. It wasn’t just the sex, though the authors of this new wave of literature seemed keen to treat the subject in as matter-of-fact a way as possible. It was also the settings, which were northern, provincial and predominantly working-class and were depicted as frankly as were the characters’ love affairs.
SF magazine subscribers only
A Kind of Psychosis

A Kind of Psychosis

We ended the twentieth century knowing less about the world than we did at the beginning. Physicists had robbed us of certainty. Newton and Faraday had lulled us into a false sense of security, then Schrödinger and Heisenberg pulled the cosmic rug from under our feet. In the twenty-first century how the cosmos is made and how it works have become impenetrable mysteries. Of course, the better- known disaster of the last century was murder on an industrial scale.
SF magazine subscribers only
Living in Someone Else’s Life

Living in Someone Else’s Life

In 1982, an advertisement for a nanny ran in The Lady. It read: ‘Disabled boy and his brother are looking for someone to look after them.’ The person hiring was Mary-Kay Wilmers, the co-founder of the London Review of Books, and the woman who answered the ad was 20-year-old Nina Stibbe, from Leicestershire. Stibbe didn’t have much experience of London or nannying. She had left school at 14 and was working in a nursing home, where copies of The Lady floated around. Stibbe drove down to Camden for the interview and her potential charges, Sam (10, with a neurological condition called Riley–Day syndrome) and Will (9) asked the questions. Eventually she was offered the job, packed up her stuff and moved into Wilmers’s large, terraced house at 55 Gloucester Crescent.
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