Articles & Extracts

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.
SF magazine subscribers only

Ladies of Letters

Virginia Woolf’s collections of essays, The Common Reader, The Death of the Moth and so on, reward those looking for interesting interstices within English literature. In the latter, in an essay entitled ‘Reflections at Sheffield Place’, I first met John Holroyd, 1st Lord Sheffield, and his daughter Maria Josepha, and found out about their friendship with Edward Gibbon. I then discovered that two volumes of letters by Maria Josepha and her family had appeared in the 1890s and that two more came out in the 1930s, edited by Nancy Mitford. Intrigued, I tracked them down and entered another world.
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A Martyr to the Truth

A Martyr to the Truth

I was back home for Christmas and convalescing from the toxic fuzz induced by months of a student existence. I lay in bed mostly trying to ignore Anna Karenina, a brick of a Penguin Classic that I had to read before rejoining the fray. A scan of the first page had been enough to convince me Tolstoy was going to be boring. No kind of style. Ordinary plot and ideas. The work of a literary oaf who handled language like a peasant feeding chickens from his bucket.
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Philosophical Designs

Philosophical Designs

Sometimes you come across a book that changes how you view the world. For me one such was Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style (1st ed. 1992). My father gave me a copy of the third edition when I was just beginning my own career as a copy-editor, and it opened my eyes to a new philosophy of life applied to the arrangement of type. Until then, I had never really thought about what text looked like. I liked books to have attractive covers, but the words inside were just words, weren’t they? How wrong I was.
SF magazine subscribers only

The Crème de la Crème

Muriel Spark’s most famous novel was published in 1961. It is set in 1930s Edinburgh, and the characters include schoolgirls at Marcia Blaine’s High School for Girls, the dull headmistress Miss Mackay, the singing teacher, the art master and, of course, the unforgettable Miss Brodie, the mainspring of the action. The so-called Brodie set of girls are what she calls the crème de la crème, the elite, the elect, the chosen few, chosen by Miss Brodie herself, their presiding deity.
SF magazine subscribers only
A Nasty Business

A Nasty Business

H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1897) has long been one of my favourite books. I first read it half a century ago – when I was about 10, to judge by the date on my Penguin edition (price 3/6d). I must have read it half a dozen times since; my battered copy is now held together with Sellotape. Recently I began watching a television adaptation: it was so disappointing that I abandoned it halfway through the first episode. This unhappy experience led me to question why it is that I like the book so much.
SF magazine subscribers only
Fidget Pie

Fidget Pie

Huffkins and Fleads, Surry Ponds and Manchets, Frumenty, Minnow Tansies and Fidget Pie. These evocative recipe titles were what first hooked me; fantastical-sounding to my ear, they might have sprung from the pages of a Lewis Carroll story. They were, in fact, authentic recipes in an extraordinary volume I found in a second-hand bookshop more than a decade ago called Good Things in England, by Florence White. It wasn’t Alice in Wonderland, but it led me down a rabbit hole of sorts. I’ve been obsessed with the book and its author ever since.
SF magazine subscribers only
Masefield’s Magic

Masefield’s Magic

I was 8 when I first read John Masefield’s The Box of Delights – in the late 1960s, in the high-ceilinged classroom of a Victorian-built school in East London. I had not long been reading ‘chapter books’ as we called them, and this was the longest, most challenging and most sophisticated one I had yet encountered – and by far the most rewarding. It’s not easy to convey the peculiar atmosphere of it: scary but funny; fantastical but believable; lyrical yet down-to-earth; grotesque, even nightmarish in parts, yet told in a friendly voice. Years later, when I had forgotten most of the details of the actual story and characters, the feeling of it remained with me, like the lingering memory of a dream.
SF magazine subscribers only
The House of Elrig | Chapter I: The House

The House of Elrig | Chapter I: The House

You can see the house from a long way off, a gaunt, grey stone building on a hillside of heather and bracken. The road, very narrow, has climbed two or three hundred feet from the sea; slanting at first from the grey boulder beach up near-cliffs of coarse grass, bracken and thorn scrub, the few trees stunted and deformed by incessant westerly winds, so that their limbs and their heads seem to be forever bowed and straining towards the land; on and up, winding through poor agricultural land, where the fields with their rough dry stone walls alternate with patches of scrubland, thorn bushes and briar thickets with the bare rock showing between them; through the tiny village of Elrig, with a smithy and a ruined mill but no shop; then, a mile on at the corner of a ragged fir wood sheltering a loch, is the turning to the house.
9 January 1942 | To War with Whitaker

9 January 1942 | To War with Whitaker

This morning I went with Michael and Esther Wright to Mena where we met Freya Stark, Sir Walter Monckton and some more. We mounted donkeys and set off with a picnic lunch for Sakara. My donkey was called Telephone and trotted along well, but some of the others were less amiable and progressed by fits and starts. Freya Stark, dressed in a hideous sporting jacket, spun on her own mills in Italy, and snake gaiters topped by a large double-brimmed felt hat, was a sight for the gods, and her running com­mentary to her donkey made Walter Monckton laugh so much he nearly fell off his mount. This evening I went to the Scottish Hospital to visit the wound­ed. It was tragically full. I found it difficult not to flinch at some of the sights and had to struggle to appear cheerful and smiling. I heard tonight we have taken Sollum. Japan has declared war on the Dutch East Indies.
As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning | Into Spain

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning | Into Spain

It was early and still almost dark when our ship reached the harbour, and when out of the unconscious rocking of sea and sleep I was simultaneously woken and hooked to the coast of Spain by the rattling anchor going over the side. Lying safe in the old ship’s blowsy care, I didn’t want to move at first. I’d enjoyed the two slow days coming down the English Channel and across the Bay of Biscay, smelling the soft Gulf winds blowing in from the Atlantic and feeling the deep easy roll of the ship. But this was Vigo, the name on my ticket, and as far as its protection would take me. So I lay for a while in the anchored silence and listened to the first faint sounds of Spain . . .
26th August 2022

Slightly Foxed Subscribers’ Writing Competition

We feel it’s time for another of our Writer’s Competitions. We’ve greatly benefited from them in the past, finding, predictably, that among our readers there are some very good writers. The competition is open to all current Slightly Foxed subscribers. The winner will receive a prize of £250 and the piece will be published in a future issue of the magazine. All entries should reach us by 15 January 2023.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
An Understanding Heart

An Understanding Heart

I can’t remember when I first read the magical trilogy that came to be known as Lark Rise to Candleford but, turning to it for comfort during the days of the 2020 lockdowns, I was struck afresh by the wonderful clarity and assurance of the writing. Most memoirs at the time Flora Thompson was writing were by comfortably educated, middle-class people, while she grew up as the daughter of a poor bricklayer in a small Oxfordshire village. Yet from the first sentence you feel the authenticity of her voice and know you are in the hands of an accom­plished writer. As her biographer Margaret Lane put it, ‘She was able to write the annals of the poor because she was one of them.’

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