Antony Wood | Contributors to Slightly Foxed literary review magazine

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Antony Wood is the founder of the small literary press Angel Books and attempts to translate Pushkin’s verse. A selection of his Pushkin translations has been published by Penguin Classics.

www.angelclassics.com

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, [16] 50; [28] 54; [32] 8; [66] 13

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‘What larks!’

Antony Wood on Christopher Robbins, The Empress of Ireland

Essentially it is the story of the friendship between Christopher Robbins, a struggling young freelance journalist, and Brian Desmond Hurst, an ageing Irish film director who had already outlived his talents and gloriously continued to do so up to his death in 1986. For a delicious period of pure fantasy in the mid-1970s the two lived the life of Reilly together. When he first met Hurst the young Robbins was in his late twenties and vainly trying to claw his way out of perpetual debt. The agent of his introduction was an enigmatic American hipster masquerading as a German count whom he’d run into in Spain, and whose expertise was ‘putting people together’.

Bentley Gently

Antony Wood on the clerihews of E. C. Bentley

One of the literary forms that has always given me most pleasure, in between the serious stuff, has been the clerihew, named after its inventor Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875–1956). Bentley was chief leader writer for the Daily Telegraph from 1912 to 1934. In 1905, a decade before he produced another of his inventions, the modern detective novel, with Trent’s Last Case, he published a slim volume entitled Biography for Beginners, which opens, under the heading ‘Introductory Remarks’, with this four-liner: The Art of Biography / Is different from Geography. / Geography is about Maps, / But Biography is about Chaps.

No Swotting . . .

Antony Wood on John Betjeman, Summoned by Bells and Collected Poems

‘Call this poetry!’ I said indignantly (it wasn’t the first time I was found too solemn, early in life). Years later I discovered that around the time I was delivering that judgement, Betjeman’s Collected Poems was selling a thousand copies a day – third on the bestseller list. (‘What ho!’ its jubilant publisher Jock Murray is said to have exclaimed, ‘I never remember such a dance since we published Byron’s Childe Harold in 1812.’)

At Home with the Pewters

Antony Wood on George & Weedon Grossmith, The Diary of a Nobody

I’m bound to admit that some of the experiences, and also, for heavens’ sake, the attitudes of the ‘pathetic ass who records his trivial life’ (as William Emrys Williams put it in his introduction to the Penguin edition of 1945), seem embarrassingly close to my own. Mr Pooter may have lived more than a hundred years ago – just up the road from where I live now, as it happens, in a house, er, rather similar to mine – but his psychology is timeless.

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