David Spiller | Contributors to Slightly Foxed literary review magazine

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David Spiller is rusticated in a Leicestershire village frequented by foxes. He tries to write, and looks for good books to read.

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, [18] 55; [20] 22; [31] 84; [35] 24; [43] 42; [50] 75; [64] 60

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The Tape-recorder Man

David Spiller on Tony Parker, The People of Providence

In the mid-twentieth century a new device came into common use, enabling every Tom, Dick and Harry to record and play back sounds stored on magnetic tape. Arriving some 500 years after Gutenberg, the tape-recorder nevertheless had a small part to play in the preparation of text for print. A handful of enterprising writers began using it to record interviews with people whose opinions were (they judged) of interest to the reading public. The recordings were then edited, arranged in a palatable order, and published in book form. These interviews were more detailed and accurate than anything previously thought possible, except by the most tempestuous exponents of shorthand. However, critics of the new approach soon emerged. Were the books worth having? they asked. Was this ‘art’? Was it indeed proper authorship? And if so, who were the authors: those who spoke into the tape-recorders, or those who switched them on?

Nobody Ever Writes to Me

David Spiller on Rupert Hart-Davis & George Lyttleton, The Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters

Readers of the published letters between George Lyttelton and Rupert Hart-Davis are like members of a club to which access is provided by introduction. My own introduction came in Delhi from my Indian dentist, one of the best-read men I have met (and the only dentist of mine who has offered coffee after a session of treatment).

Deliberately Engineered

David Spiller on the novels of Nevil Shute

It is over fifty years since the death of Nevil Shute, who from 1940 to 1960 was probably the best-selling novelist in Britain. You could hardly not read Shute in those days. I devoured him voraciously (I am 68), as did my brother, friends, mother, uncles and aunts. Yet who under the age of 60 remembers him now? If he survives at all it is through reprints on the shelves of charity shops and memories of old black-and-white films culled from his best-known books: No Highway, A Town Like Alice, On the Beach.

A Delight in Digression

David Spiller on Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia

In the north London suburb of Edmonton where I grew up, virtually the only feature of note is Charles Lamb’s cottage in Church Street, which is marked with a blue plaque. The essayist lived there in the first half of the nineteenth century. Lamb was born in 1775 and in 1792 began thirty-three years of tedious work as a clerk at the East India Company counting-house. Over the length of his adult life he lived – on and off – with his sister Mary. Their story is told in Sarah Burton’s highly readable A Double Life: A Biography of Charles and Mary Lamb (2003).

In Spite of Everything

David Spiller on James Cameron, An Indian Summer

If anything, my experience with James Cameron’s book An Indian Summer (1974) demonstrates the need for magazines like Slightly Foxed. In the 1980s I was working in India as the British Council’s books officer and reading everything I could find about the subcontinent: V. S. Naipaul’s sober tomes; Forster and Ackerley on the Maharajahs; Eric Newby on negotiating the Ganges in a small boat; Sarah Lloyd’s An Indian Attachment, about her affair with a young Sikh. Because of my job I was ideally placed to find the right stuff, yet it was only during my fifth year in India that I discovered what was – and still is – the best book I’ve read on the subject.

174517

David Spiller on Primo Levi, If This Is a Man and The Truce

Is a sequel ever as good as its original? Primo Levi’s autobiographical account of Auschwitz (If This Is a Man) is a celebrated book while its follow-up (The Truce) remains less well known. But that does not tell the whole story.

Considerable Indiscretions

David Spiller on John Colville, The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries, 1939–1955

The huge literature on Winston Churchill can seem impenetrable to the casual reader. Churchill’s own writings, with their stentorian prose, do not always appeal (though My Early Life scores through its pell-mell pace of events). Martin Gilbert’s official biography marshals the main themes superbly but cannot convey the everyday feel of Churchillian life. A host of Churchill’s contemporaries have gone into print, reporting their dealings with the great man and basking in the light of his genius. Among them is Lady Violet Bonham-Carter, whose Winston Churchill as I Knew Him describes with beguiling insight her friend’s life up to the year 1916. In the preface Bonham-Carter quotes Gray’s remark to Horace Walpole: ‘Any fool may write a most valuable book by chance, if he will only tell us what he heard and saw with veracity.’ Such a man – though certainly no fool – was John (or Jock) Colville, one of the private secretaries to Churchill in both his spells as Prime Minister. During those periods Colville kept detailed diaries of events, which were published in 1985, two years before their author’s death, as The Fringes of Power:Downing Street Diaries, 1939–1955.

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