Articles & Extracts

Reaping the Whirlwind

A warm summer day in 1987. A thump on my doorstep announces the arrival of a stout parcel with the familiar return address, BOMC, Book-of-the-Month Club. These were the pre-Internet days, when BOMC worked exclusively by mail. You had to open the brochure that arrived every three or four weeks and return the postcard that proclaimed you didn’t want the next month’s selection, or else it would be sent automatically. Having neglected to return the post­card, I found myself holding Freedom by William Safire, a 1,000-page novel about Abraham Lincoln and the first two years of America’s four-year Civil War, this account ending with Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. It was a book I did not want and had no interest in. Still, it was here. I was here. There was no harm in having a look before I sent it back. I sat down and began to read. Three hours later I was still reading. Freedom would alter the trajec­tory of my reading for the next twenty years.
SF magazine subscribers only
The Sweetest Note of All Others

The Sweetest Note of All Others

Most of the houses of East Sheen in south-west London were built on farmland as part of the great explosion of suburbia between the 1890s and 1930s. The houses are solid and the rear gardens long. There are ancient copses in nearby Richmond Park and the surround­ing patches of common land but most of the garden trees were planted by the first residents and have grown over the years to maturity, just as the hedges of hawthorn and privet have grown taller and thicker. Patient gardening turns the soil and throws up worms and hundreds of other varieties of insect. A consequence of all this activ­ity is that, with the destruction of wild woodland and the poisoning of farmland by chemical fertilizers, perhaps the safest place for wild birds is now a leafy suburb – apart, that is, from the large number of cats, sitting with deadly patience under hedges and in long grass, but I’ll come back to them.
SF magazine subscribers only
Quick Brains and Slow Tongues

Quick Brains and Slow Tongues

My parents are both now dead. My father died last, aged 90, in 2016. I had always associated my love of books with my mother’s influence. My father’s passing, however, made me realize – too late – that most of the books I turn to for comfort are those to which he introduced me. I can track my childhood through the stories he read to me at bed­time, from Pooh and Alice through to Thurber, Leacock and Conan Doyle. Later came Chandler, Hašek and others. As we grew up, he continued to read some of these aloud to us, snorting with uncontrol­lable laughter at the jokes.
SF magazine subscribers only
A Friendly Looking Lot

A Friendly Looking Lot

When I was 6 I broke my arm and had to go to hospital to have it set in plaster of Paris. All this, both the breaking and the setting, made for an eventful day. When I got home there on the table was a book, a present to cheer me up (this was 1954 when presents for a not-birthday were perhaps rarer than they are now). The book was The Bell Family by Noel Streatfeild and I have it still. It’s the story of an impoverished vicar’s family who triumph over adversity by being, basically, nicer than their odious rich relations; there’s also a cleaning lady called Mrs Gage who has a heart of gold and drops her aitches. It seems very anachronistic now, but at 6 I was a sucker for heart-warming stories about gallant, united families. And I loved the illustrations, which were by Shirley Hughes.
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An Olympian Scoundrel

An Olympian Scoundrel

It’s a funny thing, humour. What makes you laugh out loud may leave me with a face like an Easter Island statue. In my own experi­ence the funniest books are non-fiction, and most of these are biographies. There really is nothing so strange or funny as real peo­ple. If I had to present my case, then Exhibit A would surely be Bernard Wasserstein’s The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln (1988), the extraordinary, meticulous, marvellously funny biography of a man who was – well, what exactly?
SF magazine subscribers only

Mr Gryce Meets His Match

Imagine you are at a pub quiz. It’s the literature round and the theme is literary firsts. What was the first novel in English? What was the first detective story? Readers of Slightly Foxed could probably hazard a guess at Robinson Crusoe and The Murders in the Rue Morgue. But what was the first ever piece of detective fiction written by a woman? It’s a question likely to leave most readers stumped. But just in case it ever comes up, the answer is The Leavenworth Case by Anna Katharine Green, published in 1878.
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Twice Upon a Time

Twice Upon a Time

Starting a story with ‘Once upon a time’ does not guarantee a happy ending. In their classic collection of folk tales, the rather aptly named Brothers Grimm made sure there was a moral to every story: goodness is rewarded, evil is punished, sometimes quite brutally. Even Hans Christian Andersen’s stories do not all end happily ever after: the prince who disguised himself as a swineherd to test the princess’s devotion came to despise her and returned alone to his own little kingdom.
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1st December 2022

Slightly Foxed Issue 76: From the Editors

This issue of Slightly Foxed comes with our very best wishes to you all from all of us here for Christmas and the coming year. However there’s no escaping the fact that these are anxious times, and we were touched by a reader in Australia who wrote to us recently: ‘I can only say, to all the Slightly Foxed team, that you are a saviour. Slightly Foxed has kept me in touch, kept me sane, made me relish the humour, the warmth, the quirky charm of the English way of doing things.’ Wherever you are in the world, we hope you feel the same.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
Beside the Seaside

Beside the Seaside

There is something timeless about the British seaside holiday. When I was a child we’d visit my grandparents, who had a beach hut at Studland on the Dorset coast. I would spend happy afternoons playing elaborate games in the sand, interrupted only by Granny leaping from the beach hut in her skirted bathing suit, calling out to me: ‘Galey darling, we are going for a swim!’ This would fill me with terror: I had still not yet learnt to swim. ‘Nonsense!’ she’d say, diving in. When I refused to go further than mid-shin, she’d put a thumb to her nose and surge off in a no-nonsense breaststroke. This daily ordeal taught me that a family holiday by the sea is not a straightforwardly happy affair: there are always, as my mum would say, good bits and bad bits.
SF magazine subscribers only
The Dream that Failed

The Dream that Failed

Nadezhda Mandelstam was born Nadezhda Khazina in the southern Russian town of Saratov, on the Volga, in 1899, into a middle-class Jewish family. Her father was a lawyer and her mother a doctor, one of the first women in Russia to be allowed to qualify. Early in her life the family moved to Kiev, where Nadezhda attended school and then studied art. But she is famous not as an artist – she never pursued her career – but as the wife, and widow, of the poet Osip Mandelstam, whom she met in Kiev in 1919 and married soon after; and for the two-volume memoir she wrote clandestinely in the 1960s, remembering her life with her husband and reflecting on the ‘catastrophe’, as she calls it, that had overtaken them and their friends, acquaintances and contemporaries, and their homeland, since the Bolsheviks seized power.
SF magazine subscribers only
Monster-hunting

Monster-hunting

As a child I had three great ambitions. The first was to go to the South Pole – I practised wandering off to die in a storm like Captain Oates whenever snow fell in the local park. Then there was my wish to roam the London sewers having had a tantalizing glimpse of them in a Doctor Who episode. Finally, I longed to see the Loch Ness Monster and to know for sure that it existed. Now somewhat older, I find the thought of sub-zero temperatures has put me off polar exploration, and my zest for sewers is lessened by the prospect of bad smells and rodents. It would, however, still be exciting to behold across the peaty waters of Loch Ness something strange and wonderful, but I rarely give the matter much thought.
SF magazine subscribers only
An Uneasy Peace

An Uneasy Peace

The World My Wilderness strikes me as an instance of fiction that reveals as much about time and place as bald historical facts. The novel is set in 1946, when countries, societies and most of all individuals are forced to adjust from a state of total war to an uneasy peace. Treachery, betrayal, death have cast long shadows; families or couples separated for years meet across chasms of national and personal difference. Morals are twisted and corrupted; everyone is compromised by their character, circumstances and reactions to where they find themselves, which is rarely where they thought they were. The narrative is dark, complex and subtle, with much crucial information implied obliquely or imparted as it were off-screen.
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