Articles & Extracts

Mood Music

Mood Music

Until I read the bit in Rebecca West’s This Real Night where one of the main characters dies, I’d never cried properly on a plane. I’ll admit to a bit of panicky sobbing during a bout of bad turbulence, but never before had I abandoned myself to full-on, uncontrollable weeping at 33,000 feet. I won’t tell you which of the characters dies, because that would be a cruel spoiler, and I am hoping to persuade you to spend time with this strange, wonderful trilogy and the eccentric Aubrey family who live in its pages. But I’m getting ahead of myself, because This Real Night is the second book in the series and – like the unfinished third, Cousin Rosamund – was published posthumously (1984 and 1985 respectively).
SF magazine subscribers only
1st June 2005

Slightly Foxed Issue 6: From the Editors

It’s a hopeful time of year. The stalwart London plane trees have unfurled their leaves, and the sun is rising higher behind the City domes, towers and spires that we can see from our now not-so-new office windows. City-dwellers are beginning, as Hardy said, to ‘dream of the south and west’, and we hope that the travellers among you, armchair and otherwise, will enjoy Barnaby Rogerson’s piece on travel writing on p.11.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
1st March 2005

Slightly Foxed Issue 5: From the Editors

Slightly Foxed celebrates its first birthday this month, and we send special thanks and good wishes to our original subscribers who so sportingly took us on trust a year ago. We’re absolutely delighted that so many of you have decided to re-subscribe – a good number for two years. If you know of anyone who just hasn’t got round to it yet, it’s still not too late, and our offer of a reduction on a two-year subscription still stands (if you’re feeling generous, of course, you could always give them a gift subscription). And for anyone who missed the early issues and would like to complete the set, a limited number of back issues are still available.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
Time for Rhyme

Time for Rhyme

There’s a picture in The Third Ladybird Book of Nursery Rhymes of a small, nervous boy in knickerbockers appearing before a man of authority: ‘I do not like thee, Doctor Fell,/ The reason why, I cannot tell./ But this I know and know full well,/ I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.’ It’s a curious little thing, but somehow very pleasing. It rhymes, there’s a clear, easy rhythm behind the words and we’re familiar with the sentiment. In short, it’s a typical nursery rhyme.
SF magazine subscribers only

Grave Expectations

The leitmotiv of The Quincunx is the interplay of Chance and Design – do we perceive Design in our lives, or merely impose it? – underscored by the recurrence of those Dickensian coincidences that Dickens’s detractors so often deride as ‘contrived’, yet which occur in real life every day, but the foundational theme is greed: how it twists, degrades and ultimately destroys everything it touches, even the innocent, and how it so clouds the minds of men that they come to see their most heinous acts through an indestructible rose-coloured glass of self-justification. Like so much of Dickens, it is a cautionary tale.
SF magazine subscribers only
Prophesying War

Prophesying War

I enjoy reading thrillers. I might like to claim that literary fiction is my constant companion, but for most of the time it isn’t – the novels that Graham Greene described as his ‘entertainments’ give me far greater pleasure than his more serious books. Similarly, when my work as a historian took me to the period between the First and Second World Wars I found that Eric Ambler’s thrillers, written at the time, effectively captured the contemporary atmosphere, just as do Alan Furst’s more recent books. Both explore the impact of the interwar struggle between fascism, communism and democracy on innocent individuals, men who find their lives tossed about on the great waves of history. But always men. What about the women?
SF magazine subscribers only
Walden-by-the-Sea

Walden-by-the-Sea

It is a typical winter night on California’s central coast: the rain has been drumming on the roof, the dogs, happy and dry, are curled up in their beds, and my wife and I are in our bed, propped up on a pile of pillows, books in hand. I’m attempting with mixed success not to shake the bed with repressed laughter brought on by P. G. Wodehouse. My wife, having put aside the ever-present New Yorker magazine, is giving her undivided attention to The Outermost House by Henry Beston.
SF magazine subscribers only

A Frank Look at History

I am a book annotator. Of course I never write in the margins of library books, and I wouldn’t dream of marking books lent by a well-meaning friend: I’m a book annotator, not a sociopath. But a pencilled note or punctuation mark in the margin of my own books is a form of ownership, a tiny graphite beacon for future browsing and (on occasion) an aid to concentration. Most of these notes are unobtrusive – a line here, an asterisk there – but there is one book that I own which is annotated to the point of deranged excess: the Penguin Classic by Gregory of Tours, entitled The History of the Franks and translated by Lewis Thorpe.
SF magazine subscribers only
Dog’s-eye View

Dog’s-eye View

Inside of a Dog was in the New York Times bestseller list for over a year and completely passed me by because, like the baby books, you don’t need it until you’ve got your own. The author, Alexandra Horowitz, is uniquely qualified for the ambitious task of getting inside the bodies and minds of another species. Her CV includes a BA in philosophy and a PhD in cognitive science studying dogs, plus earlier stints as a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster and a fact-checker for the New Yorker. And, it perhaps goes without saying, she’s a dog person: in the Acknowledgements section at the end of the book, the dogs come first
SF magazine subscribers only

Choppy Waters

Dishonest or ‘crooked’ arguments are nothing new, but recently our fractious politics coupled with the invention of the Internet have lent them a fresh intensity, and a wider reach. Would that Straight and Crooked Thinking, written by Robert H. Thouless and first published in 1930, was now more widely read and taught in schools. This little book would not solve all our problems, of course, but it might help us see through partisan propaganda, take on unprincipled Internet warriors, persuade others honourably, defend our own beliefs effectively and (crucially) change our minds when necessary.
SF magazine subscribers only
A Hardy Perennial

A Hardy Perennial

The summer of 2018 was a glory – as long as you weren’t a gardener. For those of us who fret about plants, it was a season as much to be endured as enjoyed. After a cold, late spring, the weather had pulled a U-turn, swerving into an intense dry heat that lasted from June to the end of August. With 7 per cent less rain than even the summer of ’76 – still, after a whole series of climatic upheavals, the touchstone for freak British weather – it wasn’t so surprising that anything newly planted shrivelled in the furnace.
SF magazine subscribers only
Betrayals

Betrayals

I have a Russian wife. We work together – articles, talks, translations, books, to keep the wolf from the door. Sometimes, when a bigger than usual energy bill slides through the letterbox, or the car breaks down or the tax-man cometh, one of us will look at the other with a rueful grin and say: ‘The solution as I see it, Comrade, is to work harder.’ It’s a direct quotation from Animal Farm (1945) and the character we are quoting is the big carthorse Boxer, eighteen hands high, and the stalwart representative of the proletariat in George Orwell’s book.
SF magazine subscribers only
Fabulous Beasts

Fabulous Beasts

Christopher de Hamel’s Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts (2016) is a joy. The binding, the layout and the lavish illustration make it a pleasure to handle before you even turn to the content, which perfectly fulfils its promise. De Hamel’s writing is not academic but vivid and entertaining, while the coloured reproductions are almost as dazzling as the fabulous beasts which so often clamber around their margins. As he says in his introduction, ‘the chapters are not unlike a series of celebrity interviews’.
SF magazine subscribers only
How to Cook a Fox

How to Cook a Fox

During a time when I was unable to work I read a lot, and randomly, picking up whatever took my fancy in the local bookshop. I had recently moved to an old farmstead on Orkney with enough space to grow some vegetables and berry fruit – not exactly living off the land, but an exciting departure for someone who had always lived in a town. One day I chanced upon Patience Gray’s Honey from a Weed, took it home and soon found myself fantasizing about planting olive trees – although to tell the truth I always knew that olives would never thrive in a latitude so high that it is impossible to grow wheat here.
SF magazine subscribers only

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