Slightly Foxed > An Index to Slightly Foxed > Murray, Nicholas

Murray, Nicholas

Nicholas Murray is the author of two novels, a collection of poems, and five literary biographies. Born in Liverpool – the subject of his book So Spirited a Town – he divides his time between Bloomsbury and the Welsh Marches.

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For entries in multiple issues of the quarterly, the occurrences are separated by semi-colons.

articles by, [18] 38; [34] 74

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20080601173158 Barbara Hilliamillustration - Nicholas Murray on Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals - Slightly Foxed Issue 18

Birds, Bees and Scorpions

Nicholas Murray on Gerald Durrell My Family and Other Animals

If one were searching for the perfect antidote to Mis-lit one would find it triumphantly in Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals. First published in 1956 and in print ever since, the book is surely one of the most enjoyable English memoirs of the second half of the twentieth century. Every page is a celebration of the colours, sounds, smells, tastes and tactile sensations of the then unspoilt island of Corfu where the Durrell family arrived in March 1935 and where they lived until their expulsion from Eden in 1939 on the outbreak of war. It is beautifully written, with some astonishingly vivid and exact descriptions, whether of capturing a water snake in a stream or watching a lizard in its progress across a nocturnal ceiling, and it gets away, effortlessly, with all sorts of things one isn’t meant to get away with, not least the antics and tics of Funny Foreigners.
20120601111230 Nicholas Murray on Aldous Huxley, Mark Handley

Blight, Mildew and Smut

Nicholas Murray on Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

One of the consequences of being Aldous Huxley’s biographer was that I was invited to Eton, where a 17-year-old schoolboy with the bearing of a middle-aged barrister extended a hand and told me he had read Crome Yellow ‘in my father’s library’. In my mind’s eye I saw a book-lined room opening on to a stone terrace in some country pile like the one in the novel. But then I remembered that the book had been written in a shady back street in the Tuscan seaside resort of Forte dei Marmi in the hot early summer of 1921.

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