Slightly Foxed > An Index to Slightly Foxed > Sisman, Adam

Sisman, Adam

Adam Sisman is an award-winning writer, author of Boswell’s Presumptuous Task, shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize and winner of the US National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, and biographer of A. J. P. Taylor and Hugh Trevor-Roper. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Fellow of the University of St Andrews. He lives in Bristol.

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, [53] 7; [61] 53; [68] 20; [71] 34; [72] 14; [75] 67; [79] 78; [84] 81

Browse articles

20241118124519 Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

Academic Angst

Adam Sisman on Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

In one sense Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954) is very much a book of its time; but in another sense it is timeless. When I came to reread it recently, I feared it might not have worn well. It was, after all, pub­lished seventy years ago; it was received then as a satire on the stultified and snobbish society of 1950s provincial Britain. I first read it in about 1970 when I was in my teens, and it still seemed relevant then; but attitudes have changed considerably since, just as I have myself, alas. I need not have worried. The tone of the book still rings true today. And it remains very, very funny. Take, for example, Amis’s famous description of a hangover:
20230901123832 Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

Against the Current

Adam Sisman on Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

Wallace Stegner seems on the brink of being forgotten. Half a century ago he was acknowledged as a major figure in American letters; one of his novels won the Pulitzer Prize, and another the National Book Award. He was highly regarded, not just as a novelist, but also as a pioneering teacher of creative writing and as a mentor to a generation of younger writers. Yet when I asked around recently, not one of my bookish acquaintances recognized his name. I had never heard of him myself until a friend recommended him on a pandemic relieving country walk.
20220901110907 Adam Sisman on H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, Slightly Foxed 75

A Nasty Business

Adam Sisman on H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1897) has long been one of my favourite books. I first read it half a century ago – when I was about 10, to judge by the date on my Penguin edition (price 3/6d). I must have read it half a dozen times since; my battered copy is now held together with Sellotape. Recently I began watching a television adaptation: it was so disappointing that I abandoned it halfway through the first episode. This unhappy experience led me to question why it is that I like the book so much.
20211111095614 SFE 57, Anne Fadiman, The Wine Lover's Daughter (holding image)

A Vintage Life

Adam Sisman on Anne Fadiman, The Wine Lover’s Daughter

Anne Fadiman’s memoir of her father originated as one of several ideas for an article that she pitched to an editor at Harper’s magazine. ‘I think I could tell the story of my father’s life and character through wine,’ she proposed. ‘The Oenophile’s Daughter!’ he exclaimed. His suggested title was jettisoned when they discovered that hardly anyone else knew what ‘oenophile’ meant, or how to spell or pro­nounce it. And soon afterwards the editor parted ways with Harper’s. But the idea took root; and Anne Fadiman realized that she wanted to write a book on the subject, not an article. In many ways her eventual title, The Wine Lover’s Daughter, is a misnomer; The Wine Loving Father is a more obvious description – though of course, in telling us about her father, she also tells us about herself.
20210901101027 Adam Sisman, Hugh Falkus, SF 71

Gone Fishing

Adam Sisman on Hugh Falkus, The Stolen Years

For me, some books act like a time machine, leading me back into my past, reminding me of how it felt to be young. This doesn’t happen often, but when it does, the effect is intense. Sensations that I had forgotten arise afresh, and the world seems new again. Hugh Falkus’s The Stolen Years (1965) is one of those books, evoking for me the simplicity and innocence of boyhood. Hugh Falkus’s The Stolen Years (1965) is one of those books, evoking for me the simplicity and innocence of boyhood. Not that his upbringing was anything like mine: far from it. He was a child of the inter-war period, inhabiting first a converted Thames barge on the Essex coast, and later an old sixty-ton, straight-stemmed cutter, moored in a Devon estuary; I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, in a house in West London. Nevertheless, his reminiscences stir my own.
20201114111352

Life is the Thing

Adam Sisman on George Eliot, Middlemarch

Recently I decided to reread George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–2).  Half a lifetime had passed since my first reading. I remembered how satisfying I had found the book then; now I wondered how I would find it thirty-five years later. Rereading a favourite book can be perilous. Whatever the poet says, one can never quite recapture that ‘first fine, careless rapture’. And of course I am not the same person today as I was then.
20201009172545 Slightly Foxed Magazine Archives | L is for le Carré

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy | From the Slightly Foxed archives

Greetings from Hoxton Square where once again we’re sharing a free article from Slightly Foxed to complement a weekend of good reading. The magazine’s archive now stretches to almost 17 years’ worth of issues and over 1000 articles, all of which are available in print and on our website. This week we have combed through our back issues to bring you a piece by John le Carré’s biographer Adam Sisman on a spy fiction classic, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
20190301163701 Hilary Paynter, In-Exile, wood engraving based on the Hoffmann Garden of the Jewish Museum, Berlin (detail) - Adam Sisman, Hugh Trevor-Roper

The Hunt for Hitler

Adam Sisman on Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hilter

I cannot now remember when I first read Hugh Trevor-Roper’s The Last Days of Hitler (1947). My memory is confused by the fact that I knew the author in old age and was to become his biographer; Trevor-Roper himself told me about the extraordinary circumstances in which he had come to write the book. In September 1945 he had been awaiting discharge from the army so that he could resume his pre-war role as an Oxford don, when he was asked to undertake an urgent investigation into the fate of the Führer.
20170301152326 Adam Sisman on John le Carré, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Circus Tricks

Adam Sisman on John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

I first read John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy soon after it was published in 1974, and have reread it several times since. It is one of those books that never fails to give me pleasure, even now I know it so well. There is so much about it to admire and enjoy: the precision of the dialogue, the deftly drawn characters, the accuracy of the settings, the steadily rising tension – above all, the sheer quality of the writing. Here is a writer in complete command of his subject: able to do whatever he wants, confident it will succeed.

Buy related issues of Slightly Foxed


Buy related books or goods

Sign up to our e-newsletter

Sign up for dispatches about new issues, books and podcast episodes, highlights from the archive, events, special offers and giveaways.