Greetings from Slightly Foxed. We’ve been browsing our backlist of cloth-bound classics and thought it timely to open the covers of Denis Constanduros’s charming memoirs, My Grandfather and Father, Dear Father, published together in a handsome Slightly Foxed Edition.
These delightfully funny and affectionate portraits of the most influential male figures in the author’s life conjure up two strongly defined characters and the times in which they lived. The two could hardly have been more different. Denis’s maternal grandfather, though surviving sturdily into the reign of George V, was to his grandson a character from the ‘warm, gas-lit, stable-smelling past’ of the Victorian age and symbolized everything that was convivial and straightforward and reliable. His father Stephanos Constanduros, however, was flamboyant, melodramatic and full of grand ideas for solving his perpetual financial problems at a stroke – a tendency which ultimately led to disaster.
Please read on for an extract from this charming book, and a few suggestions for presents for this coming Father’s Day or, indeed, for any occasion. If you’re worried about delivery times, you can always request to have a gift card emailed directly to the recipient, or to you to print out at home, during the checkout process to tide you over.
And, for those of you following our travels through the archives from A–Z, today’s free article takes us on a rail journey across Europe as Frances Donnelly boards Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train. You’ll find a morsel below, together with a link to the full article.
Meantime, we’ll leave you to meet the ‘round smiling figure’ of Denis’s grandfather.
With best wishes, as ever, from the SF office staff
Jennie, Anna, Hattie, Jess & Helen