Slightly Foxed > An Index to Slightly Foxed > Gilmour, David

Gilmour, David

David Gilmour is a writer. He has lived in Beirut, Cairo and Paris, and specialised in the Middle East as a journalist. He has written on countries including Lebanon, Spain and Italy, and biographies on Sicilian writer Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Lord Curzon and Rudyard Kipling. He has also written reviews for various publications including the New York Review of Books, the Spectator, the TLS, the Financial Times and the Independent on Sunday. David Gilmour is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a former Research Fellow of Oxford University.

www.davidgilmourbooks.com

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, [4] 22; [12] 38; [30] 41; [41] 22; [54] 34; [55] 42; [65] 7; [70] 14 The Last Leopard, [11] 57

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20210518110000 SFE 55: Richard Cobb, Still Life

‘Delighted’ of Tunbridge Wells

David Gilmour on Richard Cobb, Still Life

Richard Cobb’s first book in English was A Second Identity (1969), a title he chose to show how a middle-class Englishman became not just a historian of France but a historian who effectively became French, a man who had learned to say and even feel different things on opposite sides of the Channel. He had spent many years in Paris, living in arrondissements on both banks of the Seine, carrying out a prodigious amount of research in the Archives Nationales, and writing almost always in French. He was chuffed when Frenchmen mistook his nationality. ‘Vous êtes Belge?’ they might ask, or better still, ‘Vous êtes du Nord?’ for he loved to be thought a native of the textile towns of Lille or Roubaix.
20200301142355 David Gilmour on the Far Eastern short stories of Somerset Maugham, Slightly Foxed Issue 65

Asking the Right Questions

David Gilmour on the Far Eastern short stories of W. Somerset Maugham

Aspiring young writers of fiction wish to be stylish. For many of them style is more essential than content, perhaps more important than sincerity. They want their prose to be inimitable, like Conrad’s or Hemingway’s, so that readers might identify their authorship from a single paragraph. As a young man, I was certainly like that, even though fiction didn’t turn out to be my thing. And of course I preferred to read novels by writers who themselves had a pronounced style.
20041201151152 Charles Keeping, Dawn Wind - David Gilmour on Rosemary Sutcliff, The Lantern Bearers - Slightly Foxed Issue 4

Ancient Worlds

David Gilmour on Rosemary Sutcliff, The Lantern Bearers

I was thus apprehensive, for my sake as well as my children’s, when I encouraged them to read Rosemary Sutcliff. I wondered whether I would still be drawn to her ancient worlds, her vanished races among the Caledonian Forest, her harpers and her war hosts, her bonfire festivals of Lammas and Beltane, her mead horns at Saxon feastings, her evocations of the last of Roman Britain. I need not have worried. The magic was still there. In his pantheon of literary heroes and heroines, Giuseppe di Lampedusa reserved the highest places for the authors he called creatori di mondi. Rosemary Sutcliff was such a writer, a creator of worlds, lost worlds, often worlds of lost causes, of the departing legions, of Arthurian Britain, of the last stand of the Lakeland Norsemen against the knights of William Rufus. But they are not simply worlds of battle-axes and war horns. Her imagination encompassed the natural world, a feeling for its rites and a knowledge of its workings. Some of her most beautiful passages describe the changing of seasons, the ways of wolf packs, the flights of wild geese, the solitudes of the east coast marshes. And no one (except perhaps Kipling) has handled the death of a devoted dog better than she did in Dawn Wind.
20061201164435

Dominion over Palm and Pine

David Gilmour on Jan Morris, the Pax Britannica trilogy

When people ask me what they should read about the Empire, I suggest they go to the five volumes of the Oxford History of the British Empire, where they will find a mass of recent research synthesized in scores of scholarly essays written by contemporary academic historians. But if they want to sense what the Empire was like, how it felt and smelt and looked, if they want to picture traders of the Hudson Bay Company with their beaver hats and sledges or Boer trekkers lumbering across the veld in their great ox-wagons – then I advise them to read James Morris.
20110601144828

Love Letters to Italy

David Gilmour on the works of Marie-Henri Beyle Stendhal

When André Gide was asked to name his favourite novel, he dithered over the merits of Stendhal’s works before plumping for The Charterhouse of Parma. Giuseppe di Lampedusa also hesitated, inclining towards Scarlet and Black before deciding that The Charterhouse was ‘the summit of all world fiction’. As a youth, I was puzzled by these judgements but relieved later to read Lampedusa’s view that ‘the summit’ had been ‘written by an old man for old people’ and that one had ‘to be over forty before one [could] understand it’.
20170901124115 Photograph, Rudyard Kipling - David Gilmour on the Indian stories and poems

Scandalous Tales from the Hills

David Gilmour on the Indian stories and poems of Rudyard Kipling

Kipling was thorough and blatant in his search for characters and ‘copy’ when he was in Simla. Soon after arriving in the hills he would spend an afternoon loping alongside his mother’s rickshaw, ‘learning most of the scandal’ in the town. Then he would spend his time talking ‒ and above all listening ‒ to anyone from whom he could acquire ‘goodish material’ and any ‘curious yarns’.

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