Slightly Foxed > An Index to Slightly Foxed > Leapman, Michael

Leapman, Michael

Michael Leapman has been writing for national newspapers and magazines for sixty years, and is the author of seventeen books (all non-fiction).

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, [57] 89; [59] 84; [67] 86

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20200901110354

Coal, Rent and Chaos

Michael Leapman on Gwyn Thomas, A Frost on My Frolic

A couple of years ago the judges for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction decided that none of the sixty two books submitted was funny enough to win, so they withheld the award. One of them, the publisher David Campbell, explained: ‘Despite the submitted books producing many a wry smile amongst the panel during the judging process, we did not feel than any of the books we read this year incited the level of unanimous laughter we have come to expect.’ Humour is notoriously subjective, but I am confident that if the prize had existed sixty-seven years ago, Gwyn Thomas’s A Frost on My Frolic would have been a strong contender.
20180901144304

A Well-tempered Gardener

Michael Leapman on the garden writings of Christopher Lloyd

There is no good reason why an expert and dedicated gardener should be able to write elegant prose – and a survey of the gardening shelves of bookshops, along with the many magazines devoted to horticulture, will confirm that the two skills rarely converge. One glittering exception was Christopher Lloyd, known familiarly as Christo, who died in 2006 havebaying spent almost his entire adult life developing the five-acre garden at Great Dixter, his family home in East Sussex, where he was born in 1921. He wrote columns about it for Country Life and other journals, and produced seventeen books.
20180301160009

GBS and Me

Michael Leapman on watching the plays of George Bernard Shaw

My enthusiasm for George Bernard Shaw dates from 1950, when I was 12. On my way home from school it was my habit to buy a copy of the Star, one of London’s three evening papers, principally to check the cricket scores. One afternoon the front-page splash carried the bold headline: BERNARD SHAW DEAD. At the age of 94 he had fallen off a ladder while pruning his cherry tree, and he did not recover. I reasoned that a man who warranted front-page treatment must be a writer of consequence, so I resolved to discover more.

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