Slightly Foxed > An Index to Slightly Foxed > Law, Jonathan

Law, Jonathan

Jonathan Law is a writer and editor living in Buckinghamshire. His recent books include The Whartons of Winchendon, a short study of one of the strangest families in English history, featuring incest, treason, fairies, diving and the self-proclaimed Solar King of the World.

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, [35] 7; [48] 7; [61] 45; [76] 79; [80] 71; [84] 36

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20241118122435 Jonathan Law on James Hawes, SF Issue 84

As Old as the Hills

Jonathan Law on James Hawes,The Shortest History of England

Like space, the past is always nearer than we think. As a boy, I knew a woman who once cut Thomas Hardy’s hair. For his part, Hardy knew an old countryman who had set eyes on Napoleon when the Bellerophon put into Plymouth Sound, en route to St Helena. The Napoleonic Wars are just three human lifetimes away and if you get to my age you will know that a lifetime is no vast span. Anthropologists have a thing called the ‘long generation’ – the era extending from the birth of one person to the death of the latest-born person that he or she could have met. This is where it gets hair-raising. As James Hawes puts it, in the foreword to his exhilarating The Shortest History of England (2021), ‘Seven long generations . . . the old and the young holding hands – and we are back at the Battle of Hastings.’ This inspires the same sort of vertigo as the knowledge that standing in central London you are nearer to outer space than you are to, say, Market Harborough.
20221201101831 Jonathan Law on Bernard Wasserstein, The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln, Slightly Foxed Issue 76

An Olympian Scoundrel

Jonathan Law on Bernard Wasserstein, The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln

It’s a funny thing, humour. What makes you laugh out loud may leave me with a face like an Easter Island statue. In my own experi­ence the funniest books are non-fiction, and most of these are biographies. There really is nothing so strange or funny as real peo­ple. If I had to present my case, then Exhibit A would surely be Bernard Wasserstein’s The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln (1988), the extraordinary, meticulous, marvellously funny biography of a man who was – well, what exactly?
20220106105522 W is for Warner, Sylvia Townsend | From the Slightly Foxed archives

W is for Warner, Sylvia Townsend | From the Slightly Foxed archives

Greetings from Slightly Foxed, and a very happy New Year to you all. Before we look ahead to this year’s crop of new publications, we’re taking stock, delving through our bank of back issues and sharing some good reading from the archives. Sylvia Townsend Warner’s joie de vivre – evident in her diaries and described by Jonathan Law in his article from Slightly Foxed Issue 48 – is especially appealing this January.  ‘In 1927 Sylvia Townsend Warner was given a smart notebook by a friend; a day out prompted a few hesitant jottings and, before she knew it, she was off . . .’ If you have received a new diary this Christmas, or if we can tempt you with our selection of smart Slightly Foxed notebooks, then perhaps Sylvia can provide inspiration when faced with the blank page. Whatever the case, and wherever we find you, we do hope you’ll enjoy dipping into her life and writing.
20251201100046 Jonathan Law on The Idea of North

Northern Lights

Jonathan Law on Peter Davidson The Idea of North

These days I head to the Med like everyone else: but it wasn’t always so. As a young man, just starting to travel under my own steam, my instinct was always to head north: to the Pennines, the Lakes, Scotland. To a soft southerner there was something compelling in these landscapes – and at that age I preferred a stiff walk in any weather to the languors of the beach. The final adventure was to take the little train north from Dingwall, across the vast peatlands of Caithness, to the end of the line in Thurso. It seemed something to stand on the very top of Britain, to peer at the distant Orkneys through a veil of rain, and to remind yourself that you were now on the same latitude as Stockholm or Juneau.
20231201093045 Jonathan Law on Christopher Neve, Slightly Foxed 80

Expressing the Inexpressible

Jonathan Law on Christopher Neve, Unquiet Landscape

I’m sure it is not my worst shortcoming, but it may be the one that grieves me most: I simply cannot draw. Something in this business of squinting at the world and making appropriate marks on paper eludes me. At school, I was mortified by art classes in the way that others shuddered at the thought of Games. And when I came to have my own children, their touching faith that I would be able to draw a cat or a pig or a cow could induce an almost tearful sense of inadequacy.
20190301151446 Jonathan Law on Alistair MacLeod - Slightly Foxed Issue 6

Just Staying

Jonathan Law on Alistair MacLeod

In forty years MacLeod produced just sixteen short stories, later collected in Island (2002), and one not very long novel, the extraordinary No Great Mischief (1999). Notoriously, he wrote at glacial speed, toiling over each sentence by hand until its shape and heft and tune were exactly so. You could read the life’s work in a weekend, but you mustn’t: the stories demand to be savoured slowly, the way they were written. A MacLeod sentence is a tactile thing, with the hard but polished feel of a pebble in the hand. Yet the prose is not ‘writerly’ in any tiresome way: ‘I like to think that I am telling a story rather than writing it,’ MacLeod once said, and his work retains a strong sense of the speaking or even singing voice – of folk tales or Gaelic balladry.
20151201145833 Jonathan Law on The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner, SF Issue 48

Surprised by Joy

Jonathan Law on The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner

It’s always strange to think how easily you might not have met that someone: a bus that arrived on time, or a last drink at the bar, and it might all have been quite different. Our meetings with books can be equally subject to fluke. I was in the queue at Barter Books in Alnwick, a clutch of holiday reading under my arm, when for no reason at all I picked up a green Virago paperback: The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner
20120901101751 Jonathan Law on Henry Williamson, Slightly Foxed Issue 35

Tarka the Rotter

Jonathan Law on Henry Williamson, Tarka the Otter

If we’re honest, most of us have at least one friend who we would hesitate to bring into civilized company – someone too strange or socially awkward, full of crazed notions about God or politics, given to boring on or making horrible scenes: unspeakable when drunk. Something similar holds with writers: there are books and authors that we love quite unreasonably but would hesitate to introduce to anyone nice. Often, these are the authors we read and read again, however many times we’ve given them up in despair or disgust, promising ourselves that we won’t soil another moment in their company. As with many a difficult friendship, you can end up wondering who is abusing whom. Some knotty thoughts arise: doesn’t allowing ourselves to feel ashamed of someone, anyone, always make us feel a bit ashamed of ourselves? Doesn’t it imply a priggishness – at worst a kind of treachery?

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