Slightly Foxed > An Index to Slightly Foxed > Quinn, Anthony

Quinn, Anthony

Anthony Quinn was born in Liverpool in 1964. From 1998 to 2013 he was the film critic for the Independent. His novels include The Rescue Man, which won the 2009 Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award; Half of the Human Race; The Streets, which was shortlisted for the 2013 Walter Scott Prize; Curtain Call, which was chosen for Waterstones and Mail on Sunday book clubs; Freya, a Radio 2 Book Club choice, Eureka and London, Burning. He is at work on a saga about three generations of artists, from the 1780s to 1983, entitled Molly & the Captain.

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

article by, [68] 59; [70] 91; [76] 46; [78] 81

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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.
20221201101602 Anthony Quinn on Geoffrey Fletcher, The London Nobody Knows, SF 76

A Recording Angel

Anthony Quinn on Geoffrey Fletcher, The London Nobody Knows

From the long shelf of books about London that I keep (and keep adding to) the one I most cherish is The London Nobody Knows. Published sixty years ago, it is part whimsical vade mecum, part urban elegy, a book that celebrates the lesser-known nooks and cor­ners of a capital that was in drastic transition. Knocked about by German bombing twenty years earlier, London had then come under sustained assault from planners and developers largely inimical to the architectural quirks and anomalies of the Victorian age. The author, Geoffrey Fletcher (1923–2004), was working against the clock: the ‘tawdry, extravagant and eccentric’ place he loved was fast disappear­ing, and a recording angel like himself needed his wits about him if he was to preserve its memory. The year of the book’s appearance, 1962, had already seen the destruction of two major landmarks, the Euston Arch and the Coal Exchange. More were bound to follow.
20210601110555

What’s in a Name?

Anthony Quinn on naming fictional characters

I was once interviewing Kingsley Amis when he mused, apropos of nothing, ‘Quinn . . . a Manx name, isn’t it?’ I mumbled that I thought it was Irish myself, since that’s where my forebears came from. ‘Yes, from the Isle of Man,’ he continued, ‘derived from McGuinn.’ Was it? The curious thing is that thirty years later I still haven’t bothered to find out. It feels of no more consequence to me than taking my own fingerprint. Amis’s friend Anthony Powell, a connoisseur of pedigree, would have been able to identify the name’s origin and place it exactly in the social pecking order. Not high, I imagine.
20201114112829 Anthony Quinn on Molly Hughes, A London Child of the 1870s

Accentuating the Positive

Anthony Quinn on Molly Hughes, A London Child of the 1870s

According to my journal I first read Molly Hughes’s memoir A London Child of the 1870s in October 2005, ‘a record of Islington life so charming and droll I’m puzzled as to why I’d not come across it before’. I might not have come across it then either had my wife not given me a copy, just reissued by Persephone Books in its appealing dove-grey livery with William Morris endpapers. It was a perfect choice for someone obsessed by Victorian London in general and Victorian Islington in particular. To my delight the author and her family had lived at No. 1 Canonbury Park North, an address about five minutes’ walk from where I write this. Their house is no longer standing, though the references to Upper Street, Essex Road and Highbury New Park sound a welcoming refrain, and such is the peculiar immediacy of the writing that it takes no very great leap of imagination to see an organ-grinder on the pavement, or a child bowling a hoop, or a tram upon the Holloway Road.

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