Slightly Foxed > An Index to Slightly Foxed > Boston, Anne

Boston, Anne

Anne Boston is the editor of Wave Me Goodbye: Stories of the Second World War, and the author of Lesley Blanch: Inner Landscapes, Wilder Shores, a biography of the writer and traveller Lesley Blanch.

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, [1] 32; [3] 34; [8] 40; [12] 69; [19] 18; [28] 43; [41] 78; [45] 42; [60] 41; [73] 19; [75] 41

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20220901105532 Anne Boston on Rose Macaulay, The World My Wilderness, Slightly Foxed Issue 75

An Uneasy Peace

Anne Boston on Rose Macaulay, The World My Wilderness

The World My Wilderness strikes me as an instance of fiction that reveals as much about time and place as bald historical facts. The novel is set in 1946, when countries, societies and most of all individuals are forced to adjust from a state of total war to an uneasy peace. Treachery, betrayal, death have cast long shadows; families or couples separated for years meet across chasms of national and personal difference. Morals are twisted and corrupted; everyone is compromised by their character, circumstances and reactions to where they find themselves, which is rarely where they thought they were. The narrative is dark, complex and subtle, with much crucial information implied obliquely or imparted as it were off-screen.
20220301110044 Anne Boston on Philippe Germond & Jacques Livet, An Egyptian Bestiary, SF Issue 73

A Glorious Menagerie

Anne Boston on Philippe Germond & Jacques Livet, An Egyptian Bestiary

‘Of all the civilizations of the ancient world, none enjoyed such a close and significant relationship with the animal realm as that of the ancient Egyptians.’ So Philippe Germond, an Egyptologist at the University of Geneva, plunges into his subject in An Egyptian Bestiary (2001). But already he is outflanked on the facing page by the regal profile of a leopard’s head carved in sunken relief, the sharply incised contour framing it with a powerful line of shadow. Which is fitting, for this is above all a picture book, led by 280 spectacular photo­graphs (mostly credited to his co-author Jacques Livet) of artworks that speak across the millennia and challenge the imagination.
20040901160123 Anne Boston, Lesley Blanch, Slightly Foxed Issue 3

Landscape and the Heart

Anne Boston on the works of Lesley Blanch

‘Her whole life was spent riding at breakneck speed towards the wilder shores of love.’ Lesley Blanch’s memorable description of Jane Digby el Mezrab supplied the title of her first book and her contribution to the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations; it has passed into the language, and places the writer definitively in her chosen emotional and geographical landscape. Saturated with movement and high drama, the image is outlandish, exotic, flagrantly romantic, with a hint of opéra bouffe.
20051201104414 Mark Handley - Anne Boston on the novels of Raymond Chandler

Down These Mean Streets

Anne Boston on the novels of Raymond Chandler

Chandler himself defined literature as ‘any sort of writing that generates its own heat’, which fairly describes his own best work. No other crime writer could work the same narcotic chemistry in my experience. I relished the hyperbole (‘a rough sky-blue sports coat not wider at the shoulders than a two-car garage’), the terse dialogue, the cast of outsize gangsters, millionaires, petty crooks, embittered law enforcers and femmes fatales who crossed their legs a little carelessly. And Marlowe, for ever pitted against the black knights of the beautiful corrupt city, on $25 a day plus expenses.
20040301155421

Cutting it Fine

Anne Boston on Penelope Fitzgerald, The Beginning of Spring

Early twentieth-century Moscow is the setting for The Beginning of Spring, indeed its central presence. To Frank Reid, émigré printer’s son, its weird bureaucracy, endemic espionage and corruption, its ramshackle back streets and raucous tearooms, its frozen river clotted with debris, are both familiar and profoundly foreign. But even while absorbing the surroundings we’re plunged into the drama of events, for in paragraph one Frank’s wife Nellie has already left him, taking their children with her.
20101201160831 Anne Boston, Joann Sfar - Slightly Foxed Issue 28

Feline Philosophy

Anne Boston on Joann Sfar, the Le Chat du rabbin series

Like so many cats that arrive on a doorstep and choose their owner, Le Chat du rabbin found me. I can’t explain why I was loitering in the bandes dessinées section of a students’ bookshop on the boulevard St Michel – maybe it was raining outside. I picked up Le Chat du rabbin and that was it: the coup de foudre. Only after a patrolling bookshop assistant tapped me on the shoulder some time later did I snap out of the Jewish quarter of Algiers nearly a century ago, where a talking cat lives with a rabbi and his daughter.
20181201102657 Lionel Davidson, Kolymsky Heights - Featured in Slightly Foxed Issue 60

Russian Roulette

Anne Boston on Lionel Davidson, Kolymsky Heights

I met Davidson in 1994 when Kolymsky Heights, his last and arguably his finest, was published. He was slight and unassuming, with expressive dark eyes that widened when I showed him my early proof copy and said how much I’d enjoyed it. How did he come to be familiar with the ‘howling wastes’ of Siberia, virtually closed to outsiders for decades, so chillingly evoked in the book? It was all based on factual research, he said simply; he had never set foot there.
20150301110010

Work Experience

Anne Boston on Mary Breasted, I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This

The speaker – and wide-eyed narrator of I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This – is Sarah Makepeace, ex-college girl from Four Corners, Massachusetts, newly arrived in Greenwich Village and keen to earn a byline on the front page. At the novel’s hub is a nicotine-fuelled New York city news-desk in the 1970s, when stories were hammered out on typewriters or phoned in from call-boxes – the era of Gloria Steinem and aviator glasses, the Women’s Movement at its militant height and Gay Pride before Aids struck.
20140301141148 Anne Boston, David Boyd, Slightly Foxed Issue 41

Catlike Carrington

Anne Boston on The Art of Dora Carrington

On New Year’s Day 1917 Carrington noted in her diary that her portrait of Lytton Strachey was finished; knowing her achievement, she hugged it to herself. ‘I should like to go on always painting you every week, wasting the afternoon loitering, and never, never, showing you what I paint . . .’ Today her loving tribute is on display in the National Portrait Gallery – an exception for this ambitious yet secretive painter, whose work rarely appears in public collections.
20080901101451 Slightly Foxed Paperback V. S. Pritchett, A Cab at the Door

Avid to Live and Learn

Anne Boston on V. S. Pritchett, A Cab at the Door

I shall always be grateful to A Cab at the Door. I read most of it one Sunday evening in a Victoria line tube train which was stuck for two hours outside King’s Cross station. The train lights dimmed and instead of the Blitz spirit a sullen, twitchy silence set in. I was spectacularly lucky in my companion. The sheer vigour of V. S. Pritchett’s writing and his benign, shrewd storyteller’s voice kept me suspended in his Edwardian boyhood until ‘the juice’, as the panic-stricken driver called it, came back on and we trundled away at last.

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