Nigel Andrew | Slightly Foxed literary review magazine

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Having survived twenty-two years at the Daily Mail, Nigel Andrew is now happily retired and spending more time reviewing, and writing a book chiefly about seventeenth-century church monuments.

The numbers in square brackets refer to the issue of the quarterly in which the article appears.
The unbracketed numbers refer to the starting page of the article.
For entries in multiple issues of the quarterly, the occurrences are separated by semi-colons.

articles by, [60] 62; [69] 63; [78] 90; [80] 49

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The Loss of Innocence

Nigel Andrew on Philip Larkin, A Girl in Winter

I had been reading Philip Larkin’s poetry for years before, quite recently, I decided to have a look at his novels. I knew he had written a couple in his early years: Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947). I knew too that, in their Oxford days and for some while after, Larkin saw himself as primarily a novelist, while his friend Kingsley Amis regarded himself as primarily a poet (how wrong they both were). What I did not know was that, of Larkin’s novels, the second, A Girl in Winter , far from being an early misfire, is, well, a bit of a masterpiece.

In Johnson’s Footsteps

Nigel Andrew on Lichfield’s most famous son, Samuel Johnson

‘We’re thinking of moving,’ announced our son one evening last year. ‘To Lichfield.’ Lichfield! The name was music to my ears. I have long had a soft spot for that little gem of a cathedral city, once the ecclesiastical capital of Mercia, now a delightful Staffordshire market town. I would be more than happy to follow the son, daughter-in-law and three of the grandchildren to Lichfield (and my wife, less familiar with Lichfield, would follow them wherever they went anyway).

A Kind of Cosmic Refugee

Nigel Andrew on the novels of Julia Strachey

Julia Strachey was a writer of rare talent and originality who, in a lifetime of writing, managed to complete and publish only two novels and a number of sketches and short stories. I knew nothing of her until I happened to come across a Penguin reprint of those novels, Cheerful Weather for the Wedding and An Integrated Man. I was immediately bowled over by their brilliance and originality, and was surprised to discover that, in effect, they are all there is. What stopped this gifted writer from finishing and publishing more?

Whatever Happened to Elizabeth Jenkins?

Nigel Andrew on the novels of Elizabeth Jenkins

When she died in 2010, at the astonishing age of 104, the novelist and biographer Elizabeth Jenkins was all but forgotten, her name known only to a few aficionados, her books mostly long out of print. And yet, in her day, her reputation had been up there with the other distinguished Elizabeths of mid-twentieth-century fiction, Bowen and Taylor. What happened?

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