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Articles & Extracts

Comfort and Consolation

Comfort and Consolation

Faced with the prospect of moving into a new eco-house at the bottom of our garden I have begun to realize that I must downsize my library – which is what I like to call it: a collection of many books would be more accurate. But the name doesn’t matter: the sheer number of books is the problem. I can’t resist adding to them, even though, as I am now in my late 70s, I shall never have the time to read them all; yet the thought of having to live without them is unbearable.

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Seeking an Oasis

We come to war from many different directions. My own experiences are probably similar to those of some Slightly Foxed readers: a father who survived, just, serving in the trenches in the Great War (which he never talked about); an older brother who served in North Africa and Italy in the Second World War (which he hardly ever talked about); and childhood memories of men filling sandbags, of crouching in the cellar during air-raids, of the blackout and rationing, and the night we thought Hitler had landed in our small Worcestershire town, like something out of Dad’s Army.

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Bruised, Shocked, but Elated

Bruised, Shocked, but Elated

I first met Sybille Bedford in London in the early 1980s when an old friend of mine, Patrick Woodcock, who at the time was Sybille’s doctor, invited us both to dinner. As a keen admirer of Sybille’s writing, I was thrilled at the prospect.

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The Fatal Gift of Phrase

In the age of the common man, said Malcolm Muggeridge, we all want to be uncommon, and they don’t come more uncommon than Gore Vidal, a writer for whom the term sui generis might have been coined. Quickened by a sense of mischief and a sense of justice, Vidal has been a thorn in the side of the American Establishment for more than sixty years. Pithy, trenchant, a lifelong enemy of cant, he is the embodiment, over there, of what Sir Maurice Bowra called the Immoral Front – subversives whose aim is to question everything and respect nothing.

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Scandal at School

Scandal at School

Among the jumble of postcards, newspaper clippings, maps and to-do lists that cram the walls around my desk is a school photograph. The occasion was the annual fair at which a group of us had commandeered the brightly coloured parachute used for junior school games. The photograph shows four girls – my friend Tanya, in white prefect’s blazer and sash; two of our younger protégées, all drooping knee socks and jauntily loosened school ties; and a child of 6 or 7 fresh from a visit to the face-painting stall – huddled together on the grass beneath the billowing parachute in the moments before the tent collapsed around our shoulders. I don’t remember the seconds after the shutter snapped (I was the one taking the picture) but the image records a golden period, at once bittersweet, anxious and exhilarating, in the weeks before Tanya and I left school for good.

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A Terrifying Business

A Terrifying Business

My erratic education included one year at a technical college, before it was agreed I leave on the grounds that I was incorrigibly idle. It was 1964, I was 16 and after three suffocating years at a previous school I was not going to waste my time and new freedom by studying A levels when I could do more exciting things, such as being thrown out of pubs for drinking weak beer under age. But although student and college were glad to see the back of each other, I had one regret - no more English lectures with genial Mr Butler, the single teacher for whom my rigid code of sloth made an exception.

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Biophilia for Beginners

Biophilia for Beginners

Until my early twenties, I had never really thought about Darwin. I was halfway through a doctorate in biology by then, so in retrospect this seems like a glaring omission. Naturally, I had thought about Darwinism – or more accurately, I simply knew about it. Darwinism was at the centre of a scientific ‘theory of everything’ instilled early on by my parents, both professional biologists. There were very few childish ‘why’s’ in our household that couldn’t be answered by either Darwin or Newton. Laws of nature stood in for any conventional religion, with perhaps the advantage that they didn’t seem irrational or intrusive, so as I grew up, I never felt moved to reject them. Such was the happy upbringing that could produce a student of biology who had never given a serious second thought to what has been called ‘the greatest single idea in the history of thought’: that living species are not God-given and immutable but are capable of changing and evolving under the pressure of natural selection.

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Goodbye to Berlin

For a year or two in the Sixties, I would regularly stop off on my way home at the W. H. Smith by Earls Court station. Catering for so many well placed commuters, it was a reliable showcase of current literary taste while tending to skimp slightly on the Barbara Cartland end of the market. In 1968 they gave a decent showing to The Naked Civil Servant by local reprobate Quentin Crisp; but that was nothing compared with the previous year’s razzmatazz display of Adam Diment’s much-hyped first book, The Dolly Dolly Spy.

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Eminently a Victorian

Eminently a Victorian

‘To tell the truth,’ wrote Augustus Hare, ‘had my books not been published, had The Story of My Life, and Memorials of a Quiet Life never seen the light of day, I should have missed even the most abusive things people say. One critic wrote, “What is Augustus Hare? He is neither anybody nor nobody, neither male nor female. Mr Hare’s paragraphs plump like drops of concentrated venom on the printed page.”’

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Coney’s Islands

In a writing life stretching over thirty years, Michael G. Coney wrote nineteen science fiction novels and a single collection of short stories. Although his novels combined accessibility with fine storytelling and superb characterization, they never reached the audience they deserved. Since his death in 2005, other than the publication of two novels in small press limited editions, his work has remained out of print in Britain.

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Welcome to Dictionopolis

Welcome to Dictionopolis

I’m still impressed by rainbows, and this despite knowing about light, and refraction, and the unlikelihood of the existence of pots of gold. I see a rainbow and my heart soars. And for me, if a rainbow ever fell to earth and became a book it would be The Phantom Tollbooth (1961) by Norton Juster. It is a thing of light, and wonder, and beauty.

Learn-As-You-Burn

Learn-As-You-Burn

When Slightly Foxed was young, only a few issues old in fact, the writer Christopher Hawtree came to us with the story of P. Y. Betts and her childhood memoir People Who Say Goodbye. We loved the book, and a piece about it by Christopher appeared in Issue 7. Now, several years later, we’re delighted to have the chance to issue People Who Say Goodbye as a Slightly Foxed Edition.

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The Heroism of Ordinary Life

The Heroism of Ordinary Life

Like many 15-year-olds I dreamt of understanding myself better. I knew my background was ‘bourgeois’ and thought I was probably gay. Did this mean that I ‘fitted in’? Or not? My English master lent me a story by Angus Wilson called ‘Fresh Air Fiend’, and this encouraged me to read Wilson’s landmark collections The Wrong Set (1949) and Such Darling Dodos (1950). I felt attracted by his mind: he seemed to have the social world thoroughly mapped and to be writing simultaneously with an insider’s confidence and an outsider’s sharp insights. There was a certain bitterness in these stories that both attracted and disturbed me.

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An Editorial Peacock

An Editorial Peacock

When she is not sugar-soaping her skirting boards or throwing scrunched paper snowballs of unsatisfactory prose, Kate Berridge is writing a biographical novel based on the life of John Ruskin.

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Love, War and the Countess

I think it was my old friend the Evening Standard columnist Angus McGill who recommended Hermione, Countess of Ranfurly’s war diaries: Angus would have loved her unpretentious skill at conjuring up another place, another time. Published in 1994, they have the enthralling quality that Dostoevsky called ‘living life’, oﬀering you a front-row seat at the great unfolding historical drama of the Second World War. They were written on the hoof, in moments snatched at the end of long, exhausting working days when letter- writing had also to be ﬁtted in. Fifty years later she prepared them for publication and was astonished by their success.

The Last Bookshop in Europe

The Last Bookshop in Europe

The white van was seen one morning to draw up in the little car park overlooking Clogher beach, a stormy inlet of the Dingle peninsula in south-west Ireland. Four men in black suits climbed out, edged down the slippery concrete steps and lined up on the beach. Then, as if responding to an invisible signal, they raised their arms in salute over the ocean, and shouted into the wind in a strange tongue.

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