John Harrison | Contributors to Slightly Foxed literary review magazine

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John Harrison’s travel book, Where the Earth Ends, about South America
and Antarctica, is thriving in paperback. His novel based on Beowulf will appear one day, rising horribly from the marshes and laying waste Waterstone’s.

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, [9] 50; [13] 67

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Big Windies

John Harrison on Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

Robinson Crusoe is a simple stereotype; he is you and me forced back on to our own resources. He was inspired by the true adventures of the Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk, an able but short-fused officer on the privateer Cinque Ports, who was left in the Juan Fernández Islands on Más a Tierra, now renamed Isla Robinson Crusoe. Selkirk had demanded to be marooned after he had pronounced the Cinque Ports unseaworthy, and Captain Thomas Stradling, just 21, had refused to tarry for repairs. Selkirk’s chest was fetched, and a few other items, including a musket, powder and shot. Only as the ship’s boat began to pull away did Selkirk realize the enormity of what he was doing and beg them to return. Stradling said, ‘Stay where you are, and may you starve.’ Thankfully for Defoe and us, he didn’t.

Cain’s Clan

John Harrison on Beowulf

The story of Beowulf is told in a little over 3,000 lines of poetry, written some time between the seventh and tenth centuries in Old English. The poet has a Christian viewpoint, just about, you feel, but the old pagan world is still out there, if we lapse for one moment. It feels right that the occasional Biblical references are all from the Old Testament.

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