Slightly Foxed > An Index to Slightly Foxed > Ring, Jim

Ring, Jim

Jim Ring is a writer and film-maker, the father of two and husband of one.

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, [14] 59; [18] 13; [27] 7; [43] 85; [70] 37; [74] 90; [83] 19; [85] 36

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20220601100203 Jim Ring on Arthur Ransome, We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea, Swallows & Amazons | Slightly Foxed Issue 74

Last of the Swallows

Jim Ring on Arthur Ransome, We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the perfect happiness of progeny is achieved only in the absence of their parents. As such circumstances are normally attended by certain obvious practical difficulties and disadvantages, they are to be found less in daily life than in fiction. In the twelve books of the Swallows and Amazons series, Arthur Ransome is ingenious in providing good reasons for keeping their elders and betters out of the revels of the Walker, Blackett and Callum children. In the seventh of the series he is at his most adept in placing Commander Walker in the wings but off stage until the precise moment when he is needed at the climax of the tale.
20210601122152 Jim Ring, Arthur Ransome, SF 70

All’s Well That Ends Well

Jim Ring on Arthur Ransome, Coot Club & The Big Six

Children, as any parent will tell you, are innocent beings whose sensibilities it is the first duty of every parent to protect. They are sensitive, impressionable marshmallows, easily swayed, all too often led astray. St Ignatius of Loyola warns us that if he is given the child he will mould the man; Lenin likewise cautions, ‘Give us the child for eight years [or, according to some sources, four] and it will be a Bolshevik forever.’ As thunder tails lightning, it follows that the greatest care must be taken when giving children anything to read.
20070601172220 Jim Ring on Edward Young, One of Our Submarines - Slightly Foxed Issue 14

Rites of Passage

Jim Ring on Edward Young, One of Our Submarines

The man from the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate was very insistent. On the bucking deck of the tender in Plymouth Sound he engaged me in conversation so closely as to quite obscure my view. She came out of nowhere as the tender swung alongside: a barnacled black whale 300 feet long, her casing almost awash, pitching and rolling gently in the south-westerly driving up from Penlee Point. Only the jutting conning-tower, delicately streaked with rust, distinguished her from a lurking sea monster, a leviathan. She was the 5,200-tonne nuclear submarine Talent. I was there that day at the behest of the Flag Officer Submarines to be shown her paces. All because, thirty-one years earlier in a second-hand bookshop in Croydon, I had picked up a copy of Edward Young’s One of Our Submarines.
20140901103734 Jim Ring on Winston Churchill, My Early Life

Growing Up with Winston

Jim Ring on Winston Churchill, My Early Life

Born in 1874, the son of a Chancellor of the Exchequer contemporary with Gladstone and Disraeli, he made his name as a journalist covering the Boer War, became an MP at 26, President of the Board of Trade, Home Secretary, First Lord of the Admiralty, and the scapegoat of the catastrophe at Gallipoli in 1915. He was rehabilitated in his father Lord Randolph’s old post in 1924, but by 1930 – with the Conservatives in Opposition – he was in the wilderness. There he might well have stayed. On 13 December 1931 when visiting New York, he looked right rather than left crossing Fifth Avenue and was hit by a cab. He nearly died. His autobiographical My Early Life (1929) would have been his epitaph. What a farewell it would have made to one of the nearly men of the twentieth century!
20100901103930 Jim Ring, Erskine Childers - Slightly Foxed Issue 27

Well Done, Carruthers!

Jim Ring on Erskine Childers, Riddle of the Sands

In the depths of last winter the bathroom, if by no means warm, was the least glacial room in the house. Ever since the children were born it’s also been the only place in our North Norfolk home in which there is sufficient freedom from interruption to read. I was convalescing from Zadie Smith (On Beauty) and needed the literary equivalent of comfort food: of toad in the hole, cottage pie or dead man’s leg. The choice was Howard’s End, Brideshead Revisited or The Riddle of the Sands, all steadfast companions since I grew out of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. There was a rattle of rain on the bathroom window. It was an evening for Erskine Childers. I closed the door firmly on the children, drew the bath and settled down to read.
20080601101453 Swallows and Amazons

Swallows and Amazons for Ever!

Jim Ring on Arthur Ransome, The Swallows and Amazons books

The train from the south drew in to the junction with the line that led to the hills. We changed, and already there was freshness in the air on a day of azure skies and deep shadows. I went to admire the Puffing Billy that was to haul us on the last leg of our journey, inhaling the intoxicating cocktail of hot oil and steam that engines exude. The whistle blew, I ran back to the carriage, the doors slammed, and we clanked our way west with the setting sun. I hurried from side to side of the carriage . . .

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