Slightly Foxed > An Index to Slightly Foxed > Barnard, Josie

Barnard, Josie

Josie Barnard is the author of five acclaimed Virago books, ranging from the novel Poker Face, which won the Betty Trask Award and was made into a Film Four short, to her work of creative non-fiction, The Book of Friendship. She has worked as an editor, including for Jonathan Cape, and as a journalist, writing features and reviews for newspapers and magazines including the Guardian, the Telegraph and the TLS.

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, [15] 90; [19] 40; [27] 28

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Transports of Delight

Josie Barnard on Charity bookshops

I have a pocketful of change. Around me, there’s the sound of clothes hangers on rails. Beyond a bin of old toys there’s a clink of crockery. The flooring’s worn, the smell is musty. I can hardly restrain my fingers. What am I looking for? I don’t know. That’s just the point. I’m in one of my favourite places: a charity shop, in the book section. The atmosphere’s hushed. It’s that of a museum, or, perhaps, a library. But, wait. If I love books so much, why aren’t I in a library, or, indeed, a bookshop?
20080901133603 Mark Handley illustration - Josie Barnard on William Faulkner, Slightly Foxed Issue 19

Southern Comfort

Josie Barnard on William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying; The Sound and the Fury

When I sat down to start this piece, I nearly got tangled up in theory. William Faulkner was so brilliantly experimental with form, and consequently captured the interests of literary critics over such a broad spectrum, that it is very easy to get tangled. Then I recalled why I had wanted to write about Faulkner in the first place. I’d wanted to revisit two books by which I had been smitten in my teens.
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Academic Angst

Josie Barnard on Ivy Compton-Burnett, Pastors and Masters and Malcolm Bradbury, The History Man

It was on just such a holiday that I came to read Ivy Compton- Burnett’s Pastors and Masters and Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man in quick succession. And since one is the predecessor of the campus novel and the other a seminal example of the genre, inevitably I started comparing. Compton-Burnett I’d been meaning to read for a while. But Bradbury had already been written off somewhere in my head. I’d enjoyed his criticism. Probably because of vague memories of snatched glimpses of the TV version, I’d pigeonholed The History Man as shallow and chauvinistic.

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