A. F. Harrold | Contributors to Slightly Foxed literary review magazine

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A. F. Harrold lives in Reading where he makes books and poems for children.

www.afharroldkids.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, [23] 61; [25] 7; [33] 66; [37] 50; [49] 57; [64] 81

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V is for Vonnegut, Kurt | From the Slightly Foxed archives

‘All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.’ Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 5 Greetings from Slightly Foxed, where we’ve selected another article from the magazine’s archive for everyone to read for free. This time we travel to Dresden in the Second World War by way of SF Issue 49, in which A. F. Harrold reviews Slaughterhouse 5 and reflects on the humanity of Kurt Vonnegut’s writing.

Just Getting on with It

A. F. Harrold on William Cowper, Selected Poems

I remember hearing Leonard Cohen being interviewed some years ago, and he said, when asked whether he minded being referred to as a ‘minor poet’, that no he didn’t mind at all, in fact he had spent many delightful hours in the company of minor poets, such as Herrick. My ears pricked up when I heard that. For some reason I’d never imagined Cohen sitting down and reading seventeenth-century English clergymen, but of course I was wrong.

A Plug for Dr Brewer

A. F. Harrold on Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable

Dr Brewer’s Dictionary (1870) is a uniquely curious lucky dip of a book – part anthology of proverbs, part almanac, part Classical dictionary, part trivia. The man in the street who hadn’t the advantage of schooling in Latin and Greek could now delve to his heart’s content, learning snatches of stories, myths and legends, of history and folklore. The breadth of the book, of one man’s labour, is still impressive.

Joan’s Books

A. F. Harrold on the children’s books of Joan Aiken

Joan Aiken was the daughter of the American poet laureate Conrad Aiken and the Canadian writer Jessie MacDonald, and two of her siblings also wrote books, so writing clearly ran in the family. From her pen came a raft of books, including a handful of Jane Austen sequels, period romances, supernatural short stories and most things in between. What I want to write about here though is her sequence of eleven novels for children that began with The Wolves of Willoughby Chase in 1962 – page-turning adventure stories, set in a mostly historical past, with a sprinkling of the paranormal and a bucketful of brilliant characters.

Episode 10: From Page to Stage

The Slightly Foxed Podcast

Just who are literary festivals for and why do we love them so much? Gail, Steph and host Philippa go backstage with Anne Oxborough of the well-established Ways With Words and Michael Pugh of recent start-up the Llangwm Literary Festival to find out more. From the delights of surprise-hit speakers, post-show river swims, vodka-fuelled poetry sessions and the rise of fancy food stalls to the horrors of airborne green rooms, bacon-roll bust-ups and rail replacement buses, the conversation ranges far and wide in the usual Slightly Foxed way. In this month’s audio-adventure through the magazine’s archives the writer and performer A. F. Harrold goes speed-dating with Iris Murdoch at Cheltenham Literature Festival and, to finish, there’s the usual round-up of recommended reading from off the beaten track.

Dresden and After

A. F. Harrold on Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 5

Just as I was about to sit down to write this I heard an edition of Radio 4’s A Good Read in which the comedian and writer Richard Herring chose Slaughterhouse 5 (1969), the book I had planned to write about, and he went and said all the pertinent things about it that I had hoped to say.

Putting the Hum into the Humdrum

A. F. Harrold on the poems of John Hegley

I first encountered John Hegley in the early ’90s, though only obliquely, via a schoolfriend who was hipper than me and had one of John’s early pamphlets. He showed me a limerick about ‘a creature from space/who entered a three-legged race/he was not very fast/in fact he came last/because he was a bag of oven-ready chips’. It may not look like much on the page, but it has three important things going for it: it’s silly; it’s short; and it makes full use of the last line, adding an extra foot to give the surprise a bigger kick.

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