Slightly Foxed > An Index to Slightly Foxed > Keay, John

Keay, John

the works of, [15] 52; articles by, [1] 49; [6] 67; [22] 26; [26] 21; [36] 63; [45] 25; [54] 59; [79] 72

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20230901124129 John Keay on Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone around the World

At Sea with Slocum

John Keay on Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone around the World

Books can be ill served by the company they keep. In my childhood home they were shelved in the only bookcase and consisted entirely of anthologies published as Reader’s Digest Condensed Books plus the several volumes of Churchill’s The Second World War. None was ever read or even consulted. They were just part of the furniture. Something as slight as Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone around the World was lost amongst them. ‘That was Dad’s favourite book,’ said my mother as we cleared the house after his death. I’d no idea he had a favourite book, and it was not till some years later that, hoping to understand him better, I began turning its pages.
20050601151435 The gentlest of giants - John Keay on Alan Davidson, Fish and Fish Dishes of Laos - Slightly Foxed Issue 6

On Matters Mekong

John Keay on Alan Davidson, Fish and Fish Dishes of Laos

Scrolling idly through the SOAS Library’s subject catalogue, I must have brushed an unusual combination of keys, so activating a random function not mentioned on the options bar nor widely known to researchers. The feat has since proved impossible to repeat. But I keep trying; for it was thanks to this truly serendipitous action that up flashed a title which, for its crystal candour, can seldom have been bettered. Fish and Fish Dishes of Laos was so specific it had to be just that – a handbook and culinary guide to the fish to be found in landlocked Laos. The author was Alan Davidson, the publisher Prospect Books, the category ‘Long Loan’, and the status ‘Available’. Like a minnow into the reeds, I darted to the stacks.
20040301170847 Donald Maxwell, The Water Gate, Fort William - John Keay on Krishna Dutta, Calcutta - Slightly Foxed Issue 1

City of Impregnation

John Keay on Krishna Dutta, Calcutta: A Cultural and Literary History

In her foreword to Krishna Dutta’s Calcutta, the novelist Anita Desai mentions how visitors from that city, on unpacking in the dry air of her Delhi home, invariably release a distinctive odour. ‘Damp, mouldy, deltaic, even swampy’, it clings not just to clothes but, less eradicably, to the luggage itself. I myself possess a stained and crinkled suitcase that, twenty years after its last monsoon outing to Calcutta, still reeks of bilge water. Any organic elements must long since have expired, and desiccation has lent a sub-whiff of archaeological respectability, but still it pongs. And like India itself, I can’t bear to part with it.
20070901101754

Heading for the Hills

Peter Gill on the works of John Keay

The focus of John Keay’s two books is the evolving imperial game that British India played on its north-west frontier. The Khyber Pass was one of the great invasion routes of history, and for all the Victorians knew there were other access points hereabouts. Early on in the century there were worries that Napoleon might have a go, but it was Russian steps through central Asia that turned it into the Great Game and impelled some of the most extraordinary feats of exploration. As intrepid Russians pushed south, heroic Britons pushed north. ‘Bagging the Pamirs’ was a rather different proposition from ‘bagging Munros’ in the Scottish Highlands, yet surely only the Victorians could have arranged for a naval lieutenant, John Wood, to be the first Briton to stand on the roof of the world.
20090601165644 John Keay, R. K. Narayan - Slightly Foxed Issue 22

Slow Train to Malgudi

John Keay on the novels of R. K. Narayan

I’m not sure whether it was India that introduced me to R. K. Narayan or R. K. Narayan who introduced me to India. Each superimposed itself on the other so that they became indistinguishable. Travelling round India any time in the 1970s meant reading a Narayan; and reading a Narayan anywhere else meant being transported to India. An Indian train journey was unthinkable without one. In a sense it was one, for the Narayan experience began as soon as you ventured on to railway property. This was his world. His dozen or so novels had been inspired by the vision of a unremarkable town on the main line to Madras with a station nameplate that announced it as MALGUDI. Railway life loomed so large in his fictional Malgudi that attentive readers came to know exactly what to expect and could stroll from ticket barrier to tiffin room as if to the platform born.
20100601161154 John Keay, Alan Moorhead - Slightly Foxed Issue 26

Something Marvellous to Tell

John Keay on Alan Moorehead, The White Nile and The Blue Nile

The generation that survived two world wars seemed to like nothing better than to go on reading about them. Well into the 1950s bookshops in the UK awarded pride of place to covers featuring grown-ups in cap and uniform superimposed on scenes of exploding ordnance and diving aircraft. In non-fiction as in fiction ‘War’ dominated the High Street; part-works, comics, board games and films catered to the same taste. Then around 1958, possibly in reaction to the Suez débâcle, ‘War’ began beating a retreat. ‘History’, ‘Travel’ and ‘Biography’ were encroaching. Within a decade the uniforms and the bombs had been banished to subterranean stacks now entitled ‘Military’.
20170601142147 Nicolas Bouvier, The Scorpion Fish

Stranger in Paradise

John Keay on Nicolas Bouvier, The Scorpion-Fish

The beauty of short books is that you can afford to read them more than once. In the case of Nicolas Bouvier’s The Scorpion-Fish I read it through and then double-read it. In other words, on the second reading I read each page twice before turning to the next. With just 30 lines a page and 140 pages, it didn’t take long. It was entirely pleasurable and I felt I owed it to an author I’d once had breakfast with. . .
20150301170706 John Keay on This Earth of Mankind, translated by Max Lane

A Javanese Tragedy

John Keay on This Earth of Mankind, translated by Max Lane

I did, though, on someone’s recommendation, pick up an English translation of This Earth of Mankind (1980). The first volume in the Buru Quartet, it forms a necessary introduction to those that follow and is in many ways the most evocative. The book itself smelled faintly of cloves. The text told of bamboo rustling in the night breeze, of furtive encounters and noisy frogs and thick black coffee under the bougainvillaea. To someone ignorant of all save Bali’s beaches, it brought the land and its peoples alive. I read on.

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