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Lively, Penelope

Penelope Lively was born in Cairo, and moved to England at the age of twelve. Her books have been translated into several foreign languages and been nominated for numerous awards. They include A Stitch in Time, The Road to Litchfield and Family Album, as well as many children’s books. Her short stories have been published in the Observer, The Literary Review and Good Housekeeping. She regularly reviews for The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Independent, the Observer, The New York Times. She has been awarded with an OBE, CBE and DBE, and is former chairman of the Society of Authors.

www.penelopelively.co.uk

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.

Moon Tiger articles by, [4] 28; [7] 18; [21] 12; [26] 31; [39] 61; [42] 62; [57] 61

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20230601093030 Anthony Quinn on Penelope Lively, Slightly Foxed 78

Having the Last Word

Anthony Quinn on Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger

According to a paperback column in the Daily Telegraph (15 August 1988) I greatly admired Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger (1987) and thought its closing pages ‘among the most moving I have read in years’. I wasn’t alone; the novel had already won the rather more significant distinction of the Booker Prize the year before, marking the high point of Lively’s much-honoured career in both adult and children’s fiction. So why, given my proclaimed enthusiasm, did I not read another word of hers for more than thirty years? Impossible to explain, though I made good the deficit recently, having spent the first lockdown reading about a dozen of her books in close succession.
20041201153216

Northern Lights

Penelope Lively on Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams

Arctic Dreams is much more than a travel book; its subtitle is Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape, which causes one to raise an eyebrow. Desire? What does the man mean? To be honest I am still not too sure, but by now I am sufficiently beguiled by its author not to care too much. Suffice it that he takes you on a journey to black seas in which float icebergs the size of cathedrals, to the campsites of Inuit who died fifteen hundred years ago, and to endless plains where snow geese rise like twists of smoke; that he conjures up for you the intimate presence of narwhals, polar bears, seals, whales, muskoxen.
20050901123752 Penelope Lively on William Golding, Slightly Foxed Issue 7, Caroline Forbes

Infinite Depths . . .

Penelope Lively on the novels of William Golding

William Golding’s is not a large oeuvre: fifteen books, a play, an unfinished novel. Rereading everything, I am struck by the modesty of the pile through which I have worked, and the brevity of the books. He pared fiction down to bony essentials: an entire universe in the 223 pages of Lord of the Flies, or the 233 of The Inheritors. I wanted to try to identify what it is that sets him apart – on a pedestal, as far as I am concerned.
20100601164739 Penelope Lively, Alethea Hayter - Slightly Foxed Issue 26

Dog Days

Penelope Lively on Alethea Hayter, A Sultry Month

Alethea Hayter’s clever, innovative book of 1965 turned a searchlight on a time, a place, a circle of people; it has surely inspired the subsequent fashion for group biographies, most brilliantly exemplified by Jenny Uglow’s The Lunar Men. Hayter’s book is short, succinct, intensely focused and cunningly structured. She moves forward day by day, homing in on each member of the cast – what they looked like, how they sounded: Elizabeth Barrett with her two thick curtains of dark ringlets and ‘the taut face of an Egyptian cat goddess’; Carlyle’s conversation – ‘a flood, a war-chant, a cavalry charge of splendid sentences’. All these people were leading social and literary figures of the time, a coterie who wined and dined almost daily – ‘breakfasts’ of six or eight, three hours of competitive wit and gossip.
20140601162851 Penelope Lively on Francis Spufford, The Child that Books Built

Magic Casements

Penelope Lively on Francis Spufford, The Child that Books Built

Francis Spufford’s The Child that Books Built is a short book that seems long, expansive, excursive. Of course – it cites a host of other books, from Where the Wild Things Are through The Little House on the Prairie to Nineteen Eighty-Four; it is packed with reference, with discussion. A book about books and, above all, a book about the power of books, about the manipulative effect of fiction, about the way in which story can both mirror and influence the process of growing up. A child learns to read, discovers the possibilities of that retreat into the pages of a book, and its life is never quite the same again.
20130901111756 Penelope Lively on Keith Douglas, Alamein to Zem Zem

The Poet and Piccadilly Jim

Penelope Lively on Keith Douglas, Alamein to Zem Zem

Alamein to Zem Zem bears as a frontispiece a photograph of its author. Keith Douglas leans against the bonnet of a lorry, arms spread out, smiling. He wears khaki shirt and trousers, officer’s cap. He is 22 but looks older. His moustache contributes to that effect; a moustache seems to have been mandatory officer equipment in the Libyan campaign of the 1940s, judging by other contemporary photos.

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