Slightly Foxed > An Index to Slightly Foxed > Bolt, Ranjit

Bolt, Ranjit

Ranjot Bolt is best known for his adaptations of the work of European dramatists for the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company and Sir Peter Hall, with whom he had a long collaboration.

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, [5] 44; [31] 79; [33] 29; [44] 54; [46] 83; [48] 19; [52] 20

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20111201112132 Ranjit Bolt on Claire Tomalin, The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens

A Prisoner of Her Time

Ranjit Bolt on Claire Tomalin, The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens

Why wasn’t Charles Dickens knighted, assuming he wasn’t offered the honour and declined it, as some authorities believe? Would it have been because he spilled so much ink lambasting the establishment? I think not. He was too colossal a figure for that to be an obstacle, even in Victorian England. Was it – as you will discover if you read Claire Tomalin’s masterly biography The Invisible Woman – because he kept a mistress, the actress Ellen (Nelly) Ternan? Highly unlikely, since, as you will also discover, he handled that business with the combination of psychotic secretiveness and extreme canniness that one would expect from such a man.
20120301160835

How Did He Do It?

Ranjit Bolt on the works of Philip Larkin

I came to them, the second time, quite late, It was the day The letters, full of snobbery and race hate That caused the chattering classes such dismay Came out, and Terry Eagleton had pounced: ‘Larkin is now beyond the pale,’ he’d said, ‘All decent folk should chuck him off the shelf.’ As soon as this stiff sentence was pronounced, Feeling perverse, I picked him up instead Although (because?) I was a ‘wog’ myself.
20161201145003

The Writing on the Wall

Ranjit Bolt on Jonathan Coe, The Rotter’s Club

I harbour – perversely, you might think – the fondest memories of two much maligned phenomena: the 1970s and Birmingham. I was lucky, of course. I had a relatively pleasant, carefree adolescence, and I see all this through a Proustian haze of nostalgia . . . and so, for the most part at least, does Jonathan Coe. His unabashed affection for his teens, and for the city where they took place, forms the core of The Rotters’ Club – a rite-of-passage novel which should take its place as an enduring classic of the genre, in the same league as The Catcher in the Rye or Tom Sawyer.
20150601145653 Ranjit Bolt on Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One

Waugh on the Warpath

Ranjit Bolt on Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One

Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One is not one of his ‘big name’ books. It doesn’t rank with, say, Scoop, Vile Bodies or Brideshead Revisited in the reading consciousness. I came across it only by dint of having a father who had read everything, usually as soon as it came out, and who had a first edition of the Penguin on his shelf. ‘If you like Decline and Fall,’ he would say, ‘you should read The Loved One,’ but for some reason I never did. Not until the other day, when it successfully got me through two dismal coach journeys. That is what Waugh specializes in, of course: a book to read which is like eating a longdrawn- out tea at Fortnum’s, but one you can leave and return to at your leisure – not that leaving it is all that easy.
20141201111926 Ranjit Bolt on John Betjeman, Collected Poems

A Salute to Betjeman

Ranjit Bolt on John Betjeman, Collected Poems

On Hampstead Heath a leisured stroll To calm the mind and soothe the soul – North London’s take on Flatford Mill – The air is thick with heat, and still, The sunshine gilds the two hilltops Burnishes meadow, pond and copse. All round a gorgeous vista spreads Though (adders lurk in all woodsheds) The TV mast on Highgate Hill’s A blot; the Royal Free – bitter pills For anyone who cares, to swallow And doubtless, some day, worse will follow As Betjeman once prophesied While all around him beauty died.

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