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Articles & Extracts

The Writing on the Wall

I harbour – perversely, you might think – the fondest memories of two much maligned phenomena: the 1970s and Birmingham. I was lucky, of course. I had a relatively pleasant, carefree adolescence, and I see all this through a Proustian haze of nostalgia . . . and so, for the most part at least, does Jonathan Coe. His unabashed affection for his teens, and for the city where they took place, forms the core of The Rotters’ Club – a rite-of-passage novel which should take its place as an enduring classic of the genre, in the same league as The Catcher in the Rye or Tom Sawyer.

SF magazine subscribers only

Chesterton’s Spell

Whenever I’m asked who my favourite schoolteacher was, I don’t hesitate. His name was Bill Drysdale and he taught me English when I was barely into my teens. He was tall and charismatic, with a dark beard and a beautiful bass voice. The thing we most loved about Bill, however, was that from time to time, instead of teaching us grammar, he would read us a story instead. I remember him reading Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Aldous Huxley’s The Gioconda Smile. But best of all, he introduced us to G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown Stories.

SF magazine subscribers only

How We Lived Then

When I look back at the food of my 1970s childhood, it all seems as brightly coloured as a pair of toe-socks or a brand new Space Hopper. It was a neon feast of packets and powders, stuff dehydrated, canned or frozen solid. A typical supper was Alphabetti Spaghetti and fish fingers accompanied by the happy glug of tomato ketchup; then a pudding of butterscotch Angel Delight (just add milk) with a squeeze from a tube of chocolate-flavoured sauce. Flavours were fantastical combinations of chemicals and ideas (remember ‘hedgehog’ crisps?).

SF magazine subscribers only

A Gentleman on the Case

What do you feel like reading, curled up in your armchair? Obviously, a whodunnit. But not just any old whodunnit. You don’t want the colourless style and arid tricksiness of Agatha Christie, nor the stately prose and rampant snobbery of Dorothy L. Sayers. You want the real queen of crime, the best, the darkest, the most interesting, idiosyncratic and literary novelist that the Golden Age of detective fiction produced. I refer, of course, to Margery Allingham.

That Essex Boy

‘The natural pleasure of reading it is enormous,’ wrote Maynard Keynes to his friend Lytton Strachey on coming to the end of Elizabeth and Essex. ‘You seem, on the whole, to imagine yourself as Elizabeth, but I see from the pictures that it is Essex whom you have got up as yourself. But I expect you have managed to get the best of both worlds.’

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‘Is there any news of the iceberg?’

Alan Coren was on fire. Or, at least, smoking. He was also ablaze with enthusiasm. In due course, the cigarette was extinguished. The enthusiasm was not. It was 2004 and he had come to see the archives of Punch, which the British Library had just acquired. Coren had worked on the magazine since the early 1960s and been its editor between 1978 and 1987. After he left, it went into a terminal decline, ceasing publication in April 1992. The title was eventually purchased by Mohamed Al Fayed and relaunched in 1996 but finally sank in 2002.

SF magazine subscribers only

1st March 2012

Slightly Foxed Issue 33: From the Editors

Now the year has turned and spring bulbs are bravely poking up in Clerkenwell window-boxes, we’re looking forward hopefully, as well as looking back thoughtfully over the events of the past year, which was quite an adventurous one for SF.

- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

From the editors

Dear Dodie

Dodie Smith said she never felt ‘quite grown-up’. This may sound like an excuse for tiresome behaviour, but Dodie did retain all her life a childlike charm, being under five feet tall with a high-pitched girlish voice. She was an only child, a singularly precocious, egocentric and thoroughly original one.

Goings-on in the Garden of Eden

My father’s two favourite books, which he seemed to reread almost annually, were Dickens’s Pickwick Papers, and Uncle Fred in the Springtime, by P. G. Wodehouse. Both are distinguished by complexity of plot, an array of eccentric characters and prodigious comic invention. And both are very funny.

The Library in Knightsbridge

Forty or so years ago, Harrods was still a place of considerable eccentricity. The Lending Library, with its attached Secondhand Book Department, hardly fitted with the high mark-up merchandise in the rest of this gargantuan store. However, the Harrods mantra that it could supply anything from a pin to an elephant allowed for the existence of the Library until its demise, in much reduced form, in 1989.

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At Home with the Pewters

I’m bound to admit that some of the experiences, and also, for heavens’ sake, the attitudes of the ‘pathetic ass who records his trivial life’ (as William Emrys Williams put it in his introduction to the Penguin edition of 1945), seem embarrassingly close to my own. Mr Pooter may have lived more than a hundred years ago – just up the road from where I live now, as it happens, in a house, er, rather similar to mine – but his psychology is timeless.

SF magazine subscribers only

A Matter of Dedication

Before this book-signing craze gets completely out of hand, we must establish some rules. After all, what may be considered correct in Waterstone’s could be frowned upon in Hatchards and be beyond the pale in Hay-on-Wye. Is it ever acceptable to ask an author to sign another author’s book? Fountain pen or ballpoint? What if the author mis-spells the recipient’s name? These are some of the questions I intend to tackle.

SF magazine subscribers only

1st December 2011

Slightly Foxed Issue 32: From the Editors

We’re sitting here in the office today, looking out at the leaden sky and wondering what next year’s going to be like. It’s rather a ruminative time we find, these last dark months before Christmas. One thing we do know, and that is that we’re extremely fortunate to have such a loyal body of subscribers. Some of you have been with us from the very beginning and have stuck with us ‘through thin and thin’ as the late publisher Anthony Blond once succinctly put it. We’d like you to know how grateful we are for your support – for your enthusiastic letters, encouraging phone calls, for spreading the word about Slightly Foxed – and of course for your renewed subscriptions.

- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

From the editors

Happy Lands

The novel is a beautiful collision between The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and The Catcher in the Rye, translated to the streets of Stradhoughton. This is a fictional West Yorkshire town derived from Hunslet, which stands across the River Aire from the city centre of Leeds, and is where Waterhouse grew up. I loved the novel from the first page, and I still treasure its vinegary sense of place and sardonic anti-establishment humour, perfect credentials for the wave of northern working-class fiction then rolling across Britain’s literary seabed. But Billy Liar went on to transcend the genre.

SF magazine subscribers only

Water Pistols at Fifty Paces

The year was 1934, and Richard (‘Dick’) Tibbits, it seems, had been approached by Father Talbot of the Brompton Oratory with the suggestion that there was need for a Catholic boys’ prep school in the area. So Mr Tibbits, a Catholic convert himself, decided there and then to start one.

Little Boys Lost

Being a lover of books and beautiful things, my teenage daughter usually discovers a Persephone paperback in the contents of her Christmas stocking. Last year, it was Little Boy Lost, by Marghanita Laski. She read it almost immediately and then, appraising it and me with shrewd enthusiasm, declared: ‘This is a very good book and you’ll love it.’ She was right on both counts.

SF magazine subscribers only

Articles & Extracts

The Writing on the Wall

Chesterton’s Spell

How We Lived Then

A Gentleman on the Case

That Essex Boy

‘Is there any news of the iceberg?’

Slightly Foxed Issue 33: From the Editors

Dear Dodie

Goings-on in the Garden of Eden

The Library in Knightsbridge

At Home with the Pewters

A Matter of Dedication

Slightly Foxed Issue 32: From the Editors

Happy Lands

Water Pistols at Fifty Paces

Little Boys Lost

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Articles & Extracts

Slightly Foxed Issue 33: From the Editors

Slightly Foxed Issue 32: From the Editors

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