Articles & Extracts

Batting under the Walls of Troy

Batting under the Walls of Troy

The sound of bat on ball. The smell of newly cut grass. The sight of players in whites crouching, waiting, hoping. Summer must be here. Yet for many cricket lovers there really is no close season. Come autumn, stumps may be drawn but a different type of pleasure replaces the ebb and flow of the physical contest. For the true enthusiast, those shelves stacked with old and (occasionally) new books on the game serve as the perfect antidote to winter.
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The Flight of an Odd Duck

I have been reading a number of books on everyday life in Britain in the Second World War recently and have been on the lookout for more titles to read. My friend Jack Walsdorf, bookseller, book collector, librarian and author of, among other things, a bibliography of Julian Symons, told me of the latter’s Notes from Another Country (1972). Having obtained a copy from a second-hand bookseller in Galway, I read this slim volume in a couple of hours and with enormous enjoyment.
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Sweet Revenge

There are many definitions of what makes a great work of literature, but for my money a great book must do one thing above all else: it must create a world of its own, with its own unique atmosphere and moral universe. It must invent that world and transport you into it, and make you believe in it, from first sentence to last. Paradoxically you will inhabit it intimately as an autonomous world existing independently of you, the reader. The plot and the setting, the characters and their language – all exist elsewhere, and you merely overhear, oversee, even though you are drawn into the very heart and essence of the creation. This is the godlike miracle of great writing. Homer did it, Shakespeare did it, the Brontës and Dickens did it. The new world the author creates is peculiar and true to that particular poem, play or novel, and true to no other.
Cape-bound

Cape-bound

Soon after my Dublin grandfather’s death in 1946 several heavy teachests were delivered by rail to our Lismore home. My father gleefully pored over the numerous bulky tomes: the Works of Samuel Richardson in seven volumes (1785), a History of Free Masonry in five volumes, a rare numbered edition (No. 775) of the works of Henry Fielding in ten volumes with an introductory essay by Leslie Stephen, etc. etc. Being then aged 14 I was unexcited until I came upon a slim volume (foolscap octavo) by a mid-Victorian Englishwoman identifiable on p.1 as a kindred spirit. Ever since, Lucie Duff Gordon’s Letters from the Cape, written to a devoted husband and a worried mother, has been among my favourite accounts of travel.
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The Girl from the Bogs

When Molly Keane’s best-known novel, Good Behaviour (1981), was pipped to the Booker Prize post by Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children she did not much mind. She was ‘ecstatic’ over its success, calling it ‘too extraordinary’. But this extravagant tone was neither archness nor Mitfordian flippancy (although, appropriate to her upbringing, she exhibited a strong, unsnobbish belief in the value of taste). She meant it. Molly Keane (1904–96) never considered herself a writer: ‘It’s all a great surprise to me – if you were to give me some old book of mine I’d read it with great surprise as though I had no connection with it at all.’
Championing the Underdog

Championing the Underdog

From Herodotus’ and Thucydides’ time the war book has been with us as an ever-present literary companion to the massacres on the battlefield. I took Norman Lewis’s Naples ’44 to Iraq with me in 2004 and found its humanity and honesty instantly compelling. Graham Greene considered Lewis ‘one of our best writers, not of any particular decade but of our century’, and during the darker days in Iraq it was strangely comforting to realize that there is little new in conflict. From ‘friendly fire’ and war profiteers to prostitution and petty bureaucracy, it has all been seen before.
A Poem Turned into a Sword

A Poem Turned into a Sword

The Woman Warrior was my book. I say this not to avoid accusations of parti pris – after all, everybody who writes about a book for Slightly Foxed can by definition be accused of that – but simply to make clear where I come from. In the winter of 1975 an agent sent the manuscript to Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. in New York, where I was a senior editor. It ended up in my hands, because I was supposed to be the house China expert. (I had picked up some Mandarin when I was in the army.) I remember reading it in a bleak, smoke-filled room in the Criminal Court Building on Centre Street while waiting for jury duty, and being stunned. I had never read anything like it before. I convinced my boss to take it on for publication.
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The Oldest Paper in the World

The Oldest Paper in the World

It is not surprising that having invented paper over 2,000 years ago, the Chinese found a wide variety of ways to use it. Though the seventeenth-century landscape artist and arbiter of taste, Wen Zhengheng, considered painted wallpaper vulgar, Li Yu (1611–80), owner of the Mustard Seed Garden, advocated brown rather than white wallpaper, and Chinese painted wallpaper depicting birds, flowers, garden architecture and butterflies became popular in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1794, the first British ambassador to China, Lord Macartney, even brought back a set painted with scenes of Chinese streets and workshops for his banker Mr Coutts which can still be seen in the bank’s boardroom.
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Mastering the Mutiny

Mastering the Mutiny

When John Masters’ Nightrunners of Bengal was first published in 1951, John Raymond in the Sunday Times described it as ‘the best historical novel about the Indian Mutiny that I have ever read’. In my view he’s right, although the power of the writing makes the subject matter almost irrelevant. As it is, the author has chosen one of the most chaotic and brutal episodes in the history of the British Empire in which to set his story – and he more than does it justice. It’s one of those novels that, once picked up, is almost impossible to put down. I’ve reread it many times and it still leaves me in a cold sweat of fear. It’s an old-fashioned book, written in an old-fashioned way, and it expresses old-fashioned values.
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Writers at Sea

A friend recently urged me to read Frank Kermode’s memoir Not Entitled – not for the account of a supremely successful academic career in the second half of the twentieth century, nor for insights into the making of a renowned literary critic, but for the account of his naval service. Kermode, I was told, had joined up in 1940. Isolated among madmen engaged on futile, conspicuously wasteful projects in Scotland and Iceland, his war experiences were a small, entertaining testimony to the ludicrousness of war.
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