Richard Smyth | Slightly Foxed literary review magazine

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Richard Smyth is a writer and critic whose work has appeared in the New
Statesman, the Guardian, Prospect, the TLS and the New Scientist. His books include the novel The Woodcock and, most recently, the nature memoir The Jay, the Beech and the Limpetshell. He lives in Bradford.

The numbers in square brackets refer to the issue of the quarterly in which the article appears.
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For entries in multiple issues of the quarterly, the occurrences are separated by semi-colons.

articles by, [82] 65; [83] 30; [84] 62

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Getting it Right

Richard Smyth on D. S. Macnutt, Ximenes on the Art of the Crossword

It’s a little unsettling, after a rewarding reread of Ximenes on the Art of the Crossword (1966), to take to Wikipedia and see the book’s author, pipe-puffing public-school housemaster Derrick S. Macnutt, described by a former pupil as ‘a bully and a brute’, ‘widely known for the pleasure he obtained from caning the boys in his charge’.

Marvellous Meals

Richard Smyth on Maurice Sendak, The Nutshell Library

Everyone knows that in 1963 Maurice Sendak wrote a masterpiece in ten sentences (37 pages, 338 words, beginning with ‘The night Max wore his wolf suit . . .’). That was Where the Wild Things Are (see SF no. 20). A year before, though, he wrote four masterpieces in nine centimetres.

The Making of a Bird Nest

Richard Smyth on R. S. R. Fitter, British Birds

It’s an enticing mystery, this question of how one of the great ornithological brains trusts, a convention of the finest minds in twentieth-century bird science, created the most popular bird book of its age, and perhaps of all time.

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