Slightly Foxed > An Index to Slightly Foxed > Crockatt, Richard

Crockatt, Richard

Richard Crockatt spent several years working in bookshops and as an English teacher before becoming Professor of American History at the University of East Anglia. He retired in 2011. His article, published in Issue 59, was the joint winner of the 2018 Slightly Foxed writers’ competition.

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, [59] 20; [68] 64

Browse articles

20201114113035

Scaling Gibbon’s Everest

Richard Crockatt on Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788) must rank among the best known of unread or partly read books. At over 3,000 pages it is written in the sometimes convoluted style of the eighteenth century and lingers over details which mean little now to most readers, not least disputes over the nature of the Holy Trinity. Yet this Everest of a book asks to be scaled and in the end retirement offered me leisure and the necessary oxygen to make the attempt.
20180901100235 Richard Crockatt on Thomas Mann, Magic Mountain - Slightly Foxed Issue 59

A Peak Experience

Richard Crockatt on Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

If literary critics are to be believed, understanding literature requires an analytical approach. We all know, however, that our experience of a particular book or author is often bound up with where we happen to be in life. In that sense, reading is as much about self-discovery as discovery of what the author meant. Perhaps the great books are those which can accommodate the widest possible range of reader experiences of whatever time and place. Certainly the circumstances in which I read Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924) bore little relation to those of its first German readers in the era of the Weimar Republic. Yet connections emerged in the most surprising ways.

Buy related issues of Slightly Foxed


Buy related books or goods

Sign up to our e-newsletter

Sign up for dispatches about new issues, books and podcast episodes, highlights from the archive, events, special offers and giveaways.