Slightly Foxed > An Index to Slightly Foxed > Parker, Derek

Parker, Derek

Derek Parker started life as a print journalist, then via television pursued a twenty-year career with BBC radio, writing, compiling, presenting innumerable programmes (see BBC Genome) on the arts. He then turned to writing biographies (Byron, Donne, Cellini, Casanova etc.) before retiring. He goes on writing.

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, [6] 85; [8] 58; [10] 13; [16] 69; [21] 77; [28] 83; [32] 42; [37] 69; [40] 64; [43] 73; [45] 64; [47] 75; [48] 33; [51] 90; [57] 79; [61] 89; [70] 60; [72] 60; [76] 13; [77] 86

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20230301100027 Derek Parker on Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard, Slightly Foxed 77

Power and the Prince

Derek Parker on Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard

Recently, the lack of anything worth watching on TV sent me, once again, to the DVD of Visconti’s lush 1963 film of Giuseppe Lampedusa’s The Leopard (1958). If one loves a book, the idea that a film version might be in a different way as satisfactory as the original seems a sort of betrayal. But at the very least I find it impossible to reread the book without Burt Lancaster’s Prince Fabrizio, Claudia Cardinale’s ravishing Angelica and Alain Delon’s handsome, selfregarding Tancredi illustrating the narrative as a most remarkable set of lithographs might.
20221201101038 SFE No. 61 - Colin Clark, The Prince, the Showgirl and Me: My Week with Marilyn - Slightly Foxed Editions

Shall I Be Me?

Derek Parker on Colin Clark, The Prince, the Showgirl and Me

In the summer of 1953, briefly in London during the Coronation celebrations, I took myself to the Phoenix theatre (Upper Circle, 6s.) to see The Sleeping Prince, with the two glittering stars of the time, Laurence Olivier and his wife Vivien Leigh. Olivier had commis­sioned the piece especially for the season from the playwright Terence Rattigan, and the paper-thin plot had the Regent of Carpathia, in town for the 1911 Coronation, reluctantly mesmerized by a chorus girl. No play embellished by Olivier and Leigh could fail to captivate a popular audience, and this one had a good run – but for those with a more robust appetite it was really nothing more than a moderately tasty meringue.
20211115132751 Book Recommendations | Slightly Foxed Issue 72, Winter 2021

A Guest of the Party

Derek Parker on Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

After two TV appearances and four radio interviews before 7 a.m., my wife and I were glad we could totter back to the Ambassador in Chicago or the Ritz Carlton in Boston and relax in our suite, lift the telephone and order breakfast for two. But that was half a century ago, when publishers organized publicity tours on a grand scale; now, when friends come to Australia to talk up a new book, I meet them at a hotel (three-star at best) at the back of Kings Cross.
20210601151221

The Joy of Sex

Derek Parker on the memoirs of Casanova

In the late 1780s the librarian at the Bohemian castle of Dux, fifty miles from Prague, was trying to finish his autobiography. His employer, Count Joseph Karl von Waldstein, chamberlain to the Emperor, was an amiable man, but in his absence his jealous major- domo Feldkirchner made the librarian’s life a misery. The servants disregarded his orders, the cook served him cold, inedible meals, dogs were encouraged to bark outside his room at night, and during the day a hunting horn with a peculiarly unpleasant tone was sounded at intervals. Everyone in the castle was encouraged to laugh at the elderly man’s over-meticulous manners and old-fashioned dress. All in all, it was remarkable that Giacomo Casanova succeeded in completing his masterpiece – though despite its enormous length it still ends so abruptly that there might have been a few more pages to come.
20050601123934

The Editor Regrets

Derek Parker on the Poetry Review

Suddenly, out of the blue, one morning in December 1965, a letter arrived on the delightfully old-fashioned headed notepaper of the Poetry Society (‘Patron, Sir Compton Mackenzie, LL.D., F.R.S.L., President, Professor Nevill Coghill, M.A., F.R.S.L.’), written, but not signed, by Robert Armstrong, Secretary and Treasurer. John Smith, it said, had decided that a four-year stint as Editor of the Poetry Review was ‘about enough’. He and Armstrong had undertaken ‘an intimate review’ of the situation, and were now writing to ask whether I might care to take on the job.
20051201112201 Derek Parker on Cecil Torr, Small Talk at Wreyland

Better ‘an Heaven

Derek Parker on Cecil Torr, Small Talk at Wreyland

Some books announce their quality straight away. On p.3 of Small Talk at Wreyland, the author tells of an old lady looking out across her garden on a gorgeous summer afternoon. ‘She turned to me, and said, “I were just a-wonderin’ if Heaven be so very much better ’an this: ’cause, aless it were, I don’t know as I’d care for the change.”’ The writer was Cecil Torr, born in Surrey in 1857, whose grandfather lived at Wreyland, in the parish of Lustleigh on the edge of Dartmoor. As a child he often stayed with the old man, and in late middle age, after travelling widely, he gave up his London house, went to live in Wreyland in the house he had inherited, and never left.
20060601140128 David Eccles - Derek Parker on The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse

The Maladroit Muse

Derek Parker on Charles & Lewis Lee, D. B. Wyndham (eds.), The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse

When I attempted to look up D. B. Wyndham Lewis on the Internet, Google kindly asked me if I didn’t really mean Percy Wyndham Lewis. Emphatically not. The Vorticist painter (whose age, it was suggested, could be estimated by counting the rings on his collar) was not known for his sense of humour. His namesake, on the other hand, was the first ‘Beachcomber’ of the Daily Express, and the collaborator with Ronald Searle on the tales of that least conventional of ladies’ academies, St Trinian’s. But he was overshadowed by his successor, J. B. Morton, and likewise by Searle’s brilliant drawings. DB, however, doesn’t deserve the oblivion into which time appears to be edging him, if only because he was one of the two begetters of an ‘anthology of bad verse’ which he and Charles Lee – a quiet and unobtrusive writer of Cornish novels – entitled The Stuffed Owl.
20071201163717 Derek Parker on James Thurber, Slightly Foxed Issue 16

Praisethurber

Derek Parker on James Thurber, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty; My Life and Hard Times

Not too many years ago, it would have been unnecessary to explain who James Thurber was. His short story ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty’, published in 1947 in the New Yorker (where most of his writing first appeared), soon found an international audience, and despite the best efforts of Danny Kaye to kill it off in a truly appalling film, it remains one of the most adept pieces of comic writing of its time, with most of the classic Thurber trademarks, including his delight in inventing words: among them the pseudomedical terms ‘obstreosis of the ductal tract’ and ‘streptothricosis’, and the information that ‘Coreopsis has set in’.
20090301120450 Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s bookplate, kindly supplied by Dr Geoffrey Vevers | Derek Parker article, SF Issue 21

Going for the Thing

Derek Parker on the novels of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch

One day in May 1944, with the harbour of Fowey packed with vessels of all shapes and sizes ready for the invasion of France, Mr Spreadbury, our history master, turned up in a gown with very noticeable tears in it – almost as though someone had purposely rent it. A row with Mrs Spreadbury, we conjectured? Then the bell of St Nicholas Church, down the hill, began to toll, and a little posse of masters set out for the funeral of one of the school’s governors – as it happened, a rather distinguished one: a critic and novelist, and the creator of the school of English literature at Cambridge – Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch.
20101201093752 Derek Parker, John Aubrey - Slightly Foxed Issue 28

Folliries and Misinformations

Derek Parker on John Aubrey, Brief Lives

‘My head’, John Aubrey once said, ‘was always working, never idle, and even travelling did glean some observations, some whereof are to be valued.’ No doubt at all about that, even if, as he admitted, he ‘set things down tumultuarily, as if tumbled out of a Sack’. Indeed, his lack of discipline is perhaps the chief reason why the collection of his biographical notes, known as Brief Lives, survives as one of the most delightful of all books about life in seventeenth-century England and the personalities who lived it.
20111201141906 Derek Parker on Charles Causley, Collected Poems, 1951–2000

Diamond Bombs

Derek Parker on Charles Causley, Collected Poems, 1951–2000

When Charles Causley’s first collection of poems came out in 1951 – Farewell, Aggie Weston, the first in Eric Marx’s elegant series of ‘Poems in Pamphlet’ from the Hand and Flower Press – a fellow teacher at the ‘chalk Siberia’ in which he earned his living, picked it up and remarked dismissively, ‘Good Lord – is this the best thing you can do with your spare time?’ ‘What he didn’t know’, said Causley later, ‘was that it was the teaching I did in my spare time.’
20190301153307

Striking Sparks

Derek Parker on editing the Poetry Review

As Muriel Spark had done before me I insisted that ‘if you’re a driver, you drive’ – that I would publish what I liked, and that the lady who wrote from the South of France complaining that the contents of the magazine were ‘sheer drivel that is an insult to the intelligence’ must simply be ignored. I clung on for five years, introducing a number of then young poets now celebrated. I can scarcely believe that I did all that work without a salary – editors of the magazine had never been paid, and I didn’t learn until years later that on my appointment the Arts Council had a grant of £500 a year for the Editor, linked to £1,000 for the General Secretary – conditional on the secretary not being Robert Armstrong. The offer was naturally refused. I was awarded a small ‘honorarium’ for the last two years – less than I could have earned by writing one sixty-minute radio feature.
20180301145429 Sir Edward Marsh by Howard Coster - Derek Parker on A Number of People

The Man Who Enjoyed Everything

Derek Parker on Edward Marsh, A Number of People

If Sir Edward Marsh appears in a few literary reference books, it is as the editor of five anthologies of Georgian poetry published between 1911 and 1922, the idea for which came from Rupert Brooke. As Brooke said, they ‘went up like a rocket’; ‘Yes, and came down like a stick,’ Marsh ruefully recalled. But his name pops up unexpectedly – usually just as ‘Eddie’ – in many memoirs and biographies of twentieth-century figures from Henry James to Ivor Novello, Somerset Maugham to David Cecil, D. H. to T. E. Lawrence. And he was for a quarter of a century the close friend and assistant of Winston Churchill.
20160901151402 Anna Trench. Derek Parker

Caught in the Act

Derek Parker on obscure books

I waited until my wife was looking the other way, nipped quickly in and bought it. Admittedly, it weighed six pounds, its heavy leather binding was rather battered and, as the label said, it ‘lacks part of brass lock’; but it was irresistible, even at £50 – once clearly irresistible, too, to His Majesty King Edward VII, a collection of dukes and duchesses, and ‘the whole of the leading members of the theatrical profession’, all of whom had been ‘pleased to subscribe, in advance of publication’.
20151201162344

A Talent to Amuse

Derek Parker on Arthur Marshall, Life’s Rich Pageant

Thirty years or so ago, we always shopped on a Friday morning at a local supermarket, and for a number of weeks we observed a strange phenomenon in the car park. Cars would arrive at, say, five to nine – but instead of everyone leaping out and going about their business, not a door opened until five seconds past the hour, when with one accord everyone sprang from their cars and made for the lift. The reason: at nine, Arthur Marshall stopped reading the latest instalment of his autobiography, Life’s Rich Pageant (1984).
20150901140532

The Dean and the Don

Derek Parker on Lord Byron, Don Juan

Back in 1968, when I was editing Poetry Review, published by the Poetry Society, I started a campaign to have a memorial to Byron placed in Poets’ Corner. I was tentative in my first approach to the Dean and Chapter of Westminster Abbey, suspecting they might not be particularly enthusiastic about giving space to a man who boasted of having enjoyed a hundred different women during his first two years in Venice and who thought that ‘all sense and senses’ were against belief in religion.

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