Slightly Foxed > An Index to Slightly Foxed > Mackintosh-Smith, Tim

Mackintosh-Smith, Tim

Tim is an Arabist, traveller, writer and lecturer. For thirty years his home has been the Yemeni capital San’a where he lives on the ruin-mound of the ancient Sabaean city. His books include the award winning Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land, Travels with a Tangerine, and The Hall of a Thousand Columns.

www.mackintosh-smith.com

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, [2] 11; [4] 7; [18] 86; [31] 37; [34] 68; [63] 89; [70] 7; ‘The Christmas Fox I’: Ghost Writer, [8] 5

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20210601100322 Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Anthony Burgess, SF 70

Tigers at the Double Lion

Tim Mackintosh-Smith on Anthony Burgess's Malayan trilogy

While staying recently in Chiswick, I went on a literary pilgrimage to Glebe Street, where Anthony Burgess and his wife Lynn lived in the 1960s. I wasn’t sure what I would do when I got to No. 24. Genuflect at the garden gate? Halfway down the street, a triangulation took place. The postman came out of a front gate, a woman arrived from the opposite direction and stopped him, and I stepped aside to circumvent them. As I did so, I heard the woman say, ‘Have you got anything for No. 24?’
20040601154429 Patrick Leigh Fermor, Roumeli

Off All the Standard Maps

Tim Mackintosh-Smith on Patrick Leigh Fermor, Roumeli

The only time I have been to Greece as it appears on the modern map was when I was barely out of short trousers. I went with that indispensable aid to travel, an aunt, and with the idea that I knew quite a lot about the place. My aorists and iota subscripts, however, were useless; that crucial moment for quoting Simonides on the dead Spartans never turned up. Even the sights were an anticlimax – bones of buildings, hordes of charabancs; the glory that was.
20041201100403 David Eccles, From the first, faint voice among the bed -curtains . . .’ - Tim Mackintosh-Smith on M. R. James, Casting the Runes - Slightly Foxed Issue 4

Now We’re Shut in for the Night

Tim Mackintosh-Smith on M .R. James, Casting the Runes

I must have been about 12 when I first opened James’s Collected Ghost Stories and turned to ‘A School Story’. As a boy who enjoyed gruesome yarns and, more surprisingly, Latin grammar, I was delighted to discover that the two could go together. Briefly, thus: a boy, asked for a sentence using memento + genitive, comes up, apparently out of the blue, with memento putei inter quatuor taxos – ‘I remember the well among the four yews’ – at which his Latin master has a funny turn.
20080601153549 Daniel Macklin illustration - Tim Mackintosh-Smith on The Travels of Ibn Battutah, Slightly Foxed Issue 18

Confessions of a TV Tie-in

Tim Mackintosh-Smith on Ibn Battutah, The Travels of Ibn Battutah

I’m no lover of rats. At various times I’ve shot, bludgeoned and poisoned them (Warfarin Creams work best: take a standard Bourbon biscuit and mix the poison with the chocolate filling). I’d certainly never dreamed of buying a rat, much less carrying one about in my pocket; but a few months ago I walked into a Crimean pet shop with just that in mind. I should explain. We – Dan the director, Larissa the fixer, the rest of the TV crew and I, the presenter – were in the port of Feodosia on the Black Sea, filming a series on Ibn Battutah for the BBC . . .
20111201094722 Tim Mackintosh Smith on Norman Douglas, Slightly Foxed Issue 31

Another, Darker Continent

Tim Mackintosh-Smith on Norman Douglas, Old Calabria

‘I like these old travellers,’ wrote Norman Douglas, ‘not so much for what they actually say, as for their implicit outlook on life.’ The comment comes apropos his early eighteenth-century predecessor in southern Italy, the ‘loquacious . . . restless’ Pacicchelli. Nearly a century on from the first publication of Old Calabria (1915), the equally loquacious and restless Douglas has himself become something of an old traveller.
20120601111229 Tim Mackintosh-Smith on Robert Byron, The Road to Oxiana

From Harry’s Bar to Delhi

Tim Mackintosh-Smith on Robert Byron, The Road to Oxiana

‘What Ulysses is to the novel between the wars and what The Waste Land is to poetry, The Road to Oxiana is to the travel book.’ So says Paul Fussell in the first puff on the back cover of my thirty-year-old paperback edition of Robert Byron’s 1937 masterpiece. Now, as it happens, Professor Fussell – or rather his Abroad: British Literary Traveling between the Wars – is sitting next to me, and what he actually said was, ‘Its distinction tempts one to over-praise, but perhaps it may not be going too far to say that what Ulysses is to the novel . . .’ etc. In the puff, the professorial hedging has been entirely clipped away. Still, it is high praise indeed. Is it deserved? That old stirrer Wilfred Thesiger thought The Road to Oxiana, far from being the great transformative work of twentieth-century travel, was ‘a lot of nonsense’.
20190901180152 Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Becoming a Writer

Word Magic

Tim Mackintosh-Smith on becoming a writer

Are writers born or bred? One of my grandfathers was a poet – an exact contemporary of Kipling, though rather less famous. His main contribution to literature was the invention of the poetry postcard. He also invented ‘The Quick and Easy Method of Washing Floors’, that ingenious bucket with a pedal that presses two rollers together and squeezes your mop, and which is found in every school and hospital throughout the universe; he sold the rights to it for, I think, twenty guineas.
20090520172017

‘If the rules of ‘Desert Island Discs’ allow a periodical instead of a book . . .’

Tim Mackintosh-Smith

‘I'm not sure if the rules of 'Desert Island Discs' allow a periodical instead of a book; but if they do – and no doubt the people at Hoxton Square could arrange delivery by homing albatross – I'd go for a subscription to Slightly Foxed and ration myself, very strictly, to an article a week . . . And I know I'd still read it in one go the day it arrived.’

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