Slightly Foxed Issue 28

Slightly Foxed Issue 28: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

Predictably perhaps, given the season, it’s all go here at Slightly Foxed, what with dispatching the new book bags (for which there’s been a gratifying demand – hurry while stocks last!),...

Happy Ever After

Cover Artist: Slightly Foxed Issue 28, Howard Phipps, ‘Downs in Winter’

‘The world seemed a less dismal place . . .’

G. Woodman, Belfast

‘I was away for the last few days and came back very depressed about the referendum result and full of foreboding. Yesterday as I was checking through my mail I read this message. I laughed at the...

Uncomfortable Truths

Diana Athill on W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz

There is no book more haunting than W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz. I would not advise anyone unfamiliar with his earlier books to make it their introduction to his work, because his decision to do...

Something Always Turned Up

Huon Mallalieu on Edward Ardizzone, The Young Ardizzone

Of course The Young Ardizzone is not a children’s book, rather a book about childhood intended for adults, but here, as in the Lucy and Little Tim series, the integration of words and images is...

The Child on the Beach

Sue Gee on the novels and short stories of Jane Gardam

On a summer afternoon fifteen years ago, I went to hear Jane Gardam at the South Bank Centre. She does not often appear in public, indeed she has been withering in her fiction about the idea of an...

Essential Baggage

John Julius Norwich on Maurice Baring, Have You Anything to Declare?

Maurice Baring – who was my godfather – once had a dream. He crossed the Styx, and there on the other side was, as he put it, ‘a Customs House, and an official who had, inscribed in golden...

Cheers!

Geoff Brandwood on Maurice Gorham & Edward Ardizzone, The Local and Back to the Local

When I began my under-age drinking in the early 1960s this rite of passage took place in pubs that were, in many respects, different from those of today. And it is not just the pubs themselves that...

Behind the Privet Hedge

Juliet Gardiner on R. C. Sherriff, The Fortnight in September and Greengates

In 1936 my father designed the house in which I grew up in the Fifties. I would like to say that it was a textbook example of Thirties Modernism, like a small-scale model of an ocean liner in dry...

Feline Philosophy

Anne Boston on Joann Sfar, the Le Chat du rabbin series

Like so many cats that arrive on a doorstep and choose their owner, Le Chat du rabbin found me. I can’t explain why I was loitering in the bandes dessinées section of a students’ bookshop on the...

Tips about Icebergs

Sara Wheeler on Tété-Michel Kpomassie, An African in Greenland

I first encountered Tété-Michel Kpomassie in a tent on top of the Greenland ice cap. The temperature was minus 30, and I had burrowed into my sleeping bag to read in the small pool of light cast by...

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,...

Besieged by the Sea

Ariane Bankes on Adam Nicolson, Sea Room: An Island Life

Nicolson’s instinctive love of his islands only grew with time, and he bequeathed them to his son Adam as a twenty-first birthday present. Sea Room is Adam’s own love letter to the Shiants,...

Lighting a Candle for Poetry 

Hazel Wood on The Candlestick Press: Twelve Poems about Birds; Ten Poems about Pudding; Ten Poems about Bicycles; Ten Poems about Love; The Twelve Poems of Christmas; Ten Poems by Walter de la Mare; Six Poems by Christina Rossetti; Martin Armstrong, Miss Thompson Goes Shopping; Eleanor Farjeon, Mrs Malone

When Jenny Swann’s mother died and left her a little money, she wanted to do something with it that her intelligent, well-read mother would have liked. So she started publishing poetry – not...

The Girl from the Bogs

Caroline Jackson on the novels of Molly Keane

When Molly Keane’s best-known novel, Good Behaviour (1981), was pipped to the Booker Prize post by Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children she did not much mind. She was ‘ecstatic’ over its...

Spellbound

Sarah Crowden on the children’s books of Beverley Nichols

When I was 7, I was given The Tree that Sat Down and The Stream that Stood Still, published as companion volumes in an abridged edition and written by Beverley Nichols. Apart from a strange...

Folliries and Misinformations

Derek Parker on John Aubrey, Brief Lives

‘My head’, John Aubrey once said, ‘was always working, never idle, and even travelling did glean some observations, some whereof are to be valued.’ No doubt at all about that, even if, as he...

A Touch of Morton’s

Oliver Pritchett on Acknowledgements

I love Acknowledgements. They are the Pearl & Dean moment before the main feature at the cinema, like taking time to admire the colour of the wine before the first sip, like standing on the diving...