Laurence Scott | Contributors to Slightly Foxed literary review magazine

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Laurence Scott lives and writes in south-west Scotland.

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, [25] 25; [31] 7; [34] 24; [36] 52; [60] 83; [68] 38

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Put That in Your Pipe . . .

Laurence Scott on Alfred Dunhill, The Pipe Book

One wouldn’t normally associate a book on pipes and pipe-smoking with deceit, guilt and posterior discomfort. This is how it happened. It was 1964. I was a scholastically challenged 14-year-old from north London who had just undergone double maths. Still dazed, I’d wandered off to the back of the bike sheds where I came across Howard Payne and his cronies furtively dispatching a packet of Gauloises.

Spotting a Masterpiece

Laurence Scott on the Observer’s Book of Automobiles

In 1960, when motoring for the masses was still in its infancy, I was a car-besotted 10-year-old. I liked the hand-smoothed gloss of fine coachwork, the rough heat of a flint-spiked tyre, and even the eye-smarting chemicals of cheap uncured plastic dashboards. I liked everything about them. I liked everything about the people who liked them.

The Return of Grouse

Laurence Scott on Neil Astley (ed.), Staying Alive and Being Alive

An upstairs room in a north London public library. I was teaching ‘Introduction to Contemporary Poetry’ to a class of twelve adults, and we’d been going for about twenty minutes. They were all new to poetry, no one wanted to talk, and the atmosphere was sticky. I thumbed Staying Alive – real poems for unreal times, the anthology I use as a set text, and it fell open at Seamus Heaney’s ‘Postscript’. I asked if anyone would like to read it aloud. Doreen mustered her confidence, cleared her throat, and kindly volunteered.

I’ll Be Gloria

Laurence Scott on Horace McCoy, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

The big news of 1966 was that Horace McCoy’s classic American crime thriller They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? was no longer my number one true love. It was Shelagh Spaul.

The Next Bob Dylan

Laurence Scott on Bert Weedon, Play in a Day

In 1950 guitars were rare in the UK and sales barely touched 5,000, but Elvis, Cliff and British rock ’n’ roll changed all that. In 1957, when Play in a Day was first published, annual UK guitar sales topped a quarter of a million and the number of people wanting to learn the guitar vastly outnumbered those capable of teaching it – a situation well understood by Bert, who wrote in his Introduction that he wanted his book to contain ‘the essential requirements of the lone student without a teacher’. It went straight to the top of the bestseller list and stayed there for several months. With sales to date totalling around 4 million, Play in a Day is the world’s biggest selling guitar tutor and it’s never been out of print.

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