Tim Blanchard | Contributors to Slightly Foxed Magazine

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Tim Blanchard is a freelance writer and communications consultant who lives near Cambridge. He’s written a few, fairly unmarketable non-fiction books, one on the eccentric author John Cowper Powys, others on early 80s and early 90s indie music and another on the film director Bill Forsyth and the making of Gregory’s Girl. The latest to leave agents unexcited is Hopeless. The problem with men and romantic love, which looks at novels (like The Great Gatsby, The Long Goodbye, Zuleika Dobson, Le Grand Meaulnes, and Gravity’s Rainbow etc) as a way of understanding why romantic love became such a predicament for men in the 20th century.

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, [48] 63; [75] 47; [78] 58; [90] 64

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The Man Behind the Myth

Tim Blanchard on Gordon Burn, Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son

I was going to solve the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ mystery. As a devoted Famous Five reader I just knew I would. I’d find a pattern the police had missed, like one of those Hitchcock puzzle pictures where the killer slips up by leaving his bicycle clips behind. Because the Ripper was as much a part of my 1970s world as Basil Brush and the Phantom Raspberry Blower, his reign of terror very often on the Six O’Clock News. With tea on my lap, I watched serious men report from streets of gloom and drizzle and orange sodium.

Of Mullahs and Magic

Tim Blanchard on Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet

In the driest of desert towns, Ali Hashemi leaves his bed to say his night prayers. The young man sits in the parched garden of his family’s home, an enclosed courtyard that’s mostly a place of dust, with a pomegranate…

A Martyr to the Truth

Tim Blanchard on Henri Troyat, Tolstoy

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.

A State of Dressing-gown-ness

Tim Blanchard on Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov

Oblomov, which was published in 1859, grew out of an initial sketch, Oblomov’s Dream, a portrait of life on a sleepy country estate, rustic and dilapidated in its rut of feasting and napping and storytelling. It makes some sense of Oblomov’s condition, the family history at home in Oblomovka and the way the shared love of cosy simplicity has softened his heart and his bones.

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