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Walker, Annabel

Annabel Walker is a journalist and writer from South-West Devon.

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, [4] 18; [9] 7; [17] 61; [26] 67; [30] 19; [34] 14; [37] 23; [45] 31; [66] 29

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20200601131023 Annabel Walker, A. L. Rowse, Slightly Foxed 66, Tregonissey 1912 (Francis Frith Collection)

An Outsider in Tregonissey

Annabel Walker on A. L. Rowse, A Cornish Childhood

There will be readers who find A Cornish Childhood too rooted in the egotism for which A. L. Rowse was well-known, or uncomfortably tinged with disdain for others – he dishes out verdicts such as ‘vapid’, ‘deplorable’ and ‘puerile’ with seeming equanimity and is unafraid of making dismissive generalizations about ‘the people’. At a distance of almost eighty years from publication, I mostly feel fairly forgiving towards such comments, amused rather than outraged and prepared to overlook them since his outspokenness seems so obviously a product of his particular circumstances.
20041201123058 Clifford Webb, Roman Wall - Annabel Walker on W.G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape - Slightly Foxed Issue 4

The Man Who Read the Land

Annabel Walker on W. G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape

When he was asked to update The Making of the English Landscape by W. G. Hoskins, Christopher Taylor described it as ‘one of the greatest history books ever written’. I may not have appreciated that when I bought the original version as a modest Pelican paperback in 1975 but, like any self-absorbed teenager, I was convinced of its importance to me. It was a revelation, confirming and explaining things dimly sensed yet intensely felt, and it settled deeply into my consciousness, permanently altering the way I looked at the world.
20060301110944 Photograph of Central Hotel Simla - Annabel Walker on Paul Scott

Tusker’s Last Stand

Annabel Walker on Paul Scott, Staying On

The immediate framework of the story is the relationship between the Smalleys and Mrs Bhoolaboy, tenants and landlady respectively, as they struggle to achieve very different aims: the Smalleys to remain in the lodge at Smith’s Hotel as legitimate tenants, Mrs Bhoolaboy to evict them in order to profit from the redevelopment of her property in partnership with the owners of the neighbouring Shiraz Hotel. In the course of this tussle, Tusker is driven to a level of apoplexy that proves fatal, his demise forming the opening sentence of the book.
20080301120544 Bristol - Annabel Walker on Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England - Slightly Foxed Issue 17

Pevsner’s Great Project

Annabel Walker on Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England

The forty-six volumes in Sir Nikolaus Pevsner’s Buildings of England series were originally intended as guides you could slip into your pocket. I don’t think I’ve ever actually carried one around in that fashion, not even the early, comparatively slender ones, and to do so with any of the more recent revised editions would require a poacher’s jacket and very sturdy shoulders.
20100601095824

Comfort in Desolation

Annabel Walker on Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country

There’s no shortage of fiction that might serve as an introduction to South Africa, as I discovered when I travelled there last October. I opted for the book that claimed to be the country’s first novel, Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883), some township stories by Isaac Mogotsi and A Chain of Voices, a historical novel by the modern writer André Brink. But the first thing that went into my suitcase was a book I had come across on a library shelf thirty years previously and which had remained in my mind ever since: Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country, which uses the tale of a black parson in search of his son to illuminate the state of South African society in the mid-twentieth century.
20150301172211 Annabel Walker on J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine, from The Hill of Summer & Diaries: The Complete Works

Riding the Wind

Annabel Walker on J. A. Baker, The Peregrine

Living in buzzard country, I should have been looking for a book that would fill the many gaps in my knowledge of these avian next-door neighbours. In fact, I was simply searching for the best writing on birds when I came across J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine (1967) – a book that isn’t so much the ‘best’ as the only writing of its kind on the subject. An account of the tracking of peregrines across a small patch of country in eastern England, its prose is really poetry of the most intense kind; experience compressed into a language that has been honed to the keenest of edges. Baker wields it fiercely, dispensing almost immediately with convention (‘Detailed descriptions of landscape are tedious’), slicing early paragraphs of information into staccato sentences and cutting and splicing verbs, nouns and adjectives so that the reader cannot help but see all anew, through Baker’s passionate eye.
20130301140832

A World of Words

Annabel Walker on Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness

Whether by luck or judgement I don’t now remember, but I first came across the work of Amos Oz in 1984. The occasion was my sole visit to Israel, when I needed a contemporary guide, my only other literary encounter with Jewish culture having been three historical novels by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Somewhere between Singer’s nineteenth-century Poland and Oz’s modern stories came the horrors of the Nazi era: the bit of Jewish history that everyone knows and that is built into everyone’s idea of the state of Israel. It was in my mind at the time, not least because the parents of our Israeli friend bore the tattoos of the concentration camp on their forearms.
20120601152029 No. 18 Elspeth Huxley, The Flame Trees of Thika

A Child in Africa

Annabel Walker on Elspeth Huxley, The Flame Trees of Thika

Most people have some memories of early childhood that remain vividly with them through life. Sometimes they are impossible to describe, being chiefly a quite indefinable feeling prompted by opening a particular book, or an atmosphere conjured by hearing a certain piece of music. Others are more easily converted into words: the details of a flower found in a lawn, the pattern on a hall floor, the smell of a great-aunt’s sitting-room.

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