Anthony Longden | Contributors to Slightly Foxed Magazine

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Anthony Longden has been a journalist for more than 35 years, 22 of them spent as a newspaper editor and senior executive. He served on the Press Complaints Commission, is a consultant to the Society of Editors, and a specialist partner for a crisis communications company. He is also a session musician, has appeared at Reading and Glastonbury festivals, and written music for television and films that have either sunk without trace or are generally best forgotten. He can normally be found mining the stacks at the London Library, or out and about in the Colne Valley Regional Park, of which he is a Director. He is married and lives in London.

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, [36] 88; [38] 70; [41] 63; [47] 68; [55] 7; [57] 46; [63] 69; [68] 31

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Strangely Prophetic

Anthony Longden on Simon Harcourt-Smith, The Last of Uptake

I always take particular pleasure in people’s stories about how they discover books. For me, the process is quite conventional, more often than not the result of a trip to the London Library, through word of mouth, via Slightly Foxed, or a profitable hour or two spent in a favourite second-hand bookshop. There is one exception in my experience, though: a discovery made thanks to a devastating fire at a country house.

A Queer Parish

Anthony Longden on Ruth Adam, A House in the Country

I was on a much-rehearsed trawl of the labyrinthine bookshop when I spotted it. A neat green-cloth country volume of the type churned out in their thousands in the 1940s and ’50s – years of hardship but also ones of optimism and dreams of a better future. I read the faded spine. A House in the Country by Ruth Adam, published by the Country Book Club, 1957. Now this is the kind of thing I like. My bookshelves sag under the collective weight of H. J. Massingham, Adrian Bell, Ronald Blythe and Cecil Torr, but Ruth Adam was new to me. ‘This is a cautionary tale, and true,’ the book begins . . .

Billiards, Tobacco and Wine

Anthony Longden on Cuthbert Bede, The Adventures of Mr Verdant Green

I first happened across him while mining the rewarding and delightfully chaotic depths of a West Country bookshop. He has been out of fashion for a considerable time, always a recommendation as far as I’m concerned, but I think his series beginning with The Adventures of Mr Verdant Green deserves to be regarded as a mid-Victorian comedy classic.

Down-to-Earth in Over Stowey

Anthony Longden on The Diary of William Holland, Somerset Parson, 1799-1818

I have always had a weakness for diaries and memoirs, especially those written by men of the cloth. It’s generally quite gentle observational stuff, cataloguing the daily round, usually in a country parish, and much of its fascination lies in the diurnal detail, some of it joyous, some of it poignant, as local characters are christened, married and buried. This writing, for me at least, provides an instant escape to a lost world running at less than half the speed of our own.

Well Earthed

Anthony Longden on S. L. Bensusan, Village Idylls; A Marshland Omnibus

I rediscovered an old favourite the other day. Peering up at the dusty gloom of my highest bookshelves, I caught sight of a name that first captivated me more than twenty years ago. S. L. Bensusan was an accomplished journalist and writer who enjoyed enormous popularity in the early to mid-twentieth century, but while so much of that period is now very much in vogue, he is little read today. This, I think, is a real pity, since his characters are so vividly drawn, his stories so beguiling.

$Anthony Longden on the works of Ella Pontefract and Marie Hartley$

Black Dogs and Stone Pianos

Anthony Longden on the works of Ella Pontefract and Marie Hartley

Despite the solidity of its dry stone walls and its rugged beauty, the landscape of the Yorkshire Dales is fragile. By the 1920s, more vulnerable still was the way of life that had continued there for hundreds of years but which was rapidly dying out. Two young women – the writer Ella Pontefract and the artist Marie Hartley – realized that if no record were kept, more than a thousand years of rural tradition would vanish without trace. They decided to do something about it, and embarked on a remarkable literary enterprise that continues to illuminate the life and lore of the Dales. The collaboration was also to bring the companions domestic fulfilment and, to their surprise, a whiff of celebrity.

Summer Sunrise, Winter Twilight

Anthony Longden on the books of J. H. B. Peel

Numbed with despair over the threat to the fragile beauty of the Chilterns and the villages of Buckinghamshire posed by the new high-speed rail link, I went in search of solace. I badly needed a dose of that reassuring country writing which once enjoyed such a boom, but which now seems to have slipped out of fashion. For me, the first and only choice was J. H. B. Peel.

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