Slightly Foxed Issue 48

Slightly Foxed Issue 48: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

By now most of us have probably begun the often rather agonized run-up to Christmas – the worry about what to buy for whom and where to find it. For Slightly Foxed readers, we suspect books are...

Surprised by Joy

Jonathan Law on The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner

It’s always strange to think how easily you might not have met that someone: a bus that arrived on time, or a last drink at the bar, and it might all have been quite different. Our meetings with...

A Literary Love Affair

Maggie Fergusson, Preface to Helene Hanff, 84, Charing Cross Road

I thought I could never feel fond of Charing Cross Road. In 1988, when I was 23, I spent a miserable three months there doing a ‘Sight and Sound’ typing course on the bleak first floor of a...

Slightly Foxed Issue 48: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

By now most of us have probably begun the often rather agonized run-up to Christmas – the worry about what to buy for whom and where to find it. For Slightly Foxed readers, we suspect books are...

Cover Artist: Slightly Foxed Issue 48, Sarah Woolfenden, ‘River in Winter’

‘Beautiful copy of 84, Charing Cross Road . . .’

J. Barry, Hertfordshire

‘A little early to send a Christmas card, but I felt I needed to thank you after such a after such a pleasant weekend, due to the arrival of both the Winter issue of the magazine and the beautiful...

‘I am working my way through the book with great delight . . .’

D. Jennings, Manchester

‘Dear Slightly Foxed, Many thanks for No. 48 and 84, Charing Cross Road. Ms Hanff has lost none of her exuberant charm over the years and I am working my way through the book with great delight . ....

Ripping Rhymes

Ranjit Bolt on Hilaire Belloc, Cautionary Tales for Children

‘It’s Belloc’s Cautionary Tales – A sovereign salve that never fails To brighten up the blackest mood And lift the lowest attitude.’

Happy Lands

Robin Blake on Keith Waterhouse, Billy Liar

The novel is a beautiful collision between The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and The Catcher in the Rye, translated to the streets of Stradhoughton. This is a fictional West Yorkshire town derived from...

Learning By Heart

Julia Blackburn on Arthur Quiller-Couch, The Oxford Book of Ballads

I was born in 1948 and so I stepped over into vague adulthood during the 1960s. My parents were what you might call bohemian, which meant they used Freud as the springboard for seeing sex in every...

A Talent to Amuse

Derek Parker on Arthur Marshall, Life’s Rich Pageant

Thirty years or so ago, we always shopped on a Friday morning at a local supermarket, and for a number of weeks we observed a strange phenomenon in the car park. Cars would arrive at, say, five to...

Touched with a Secret Delight

Melissa Harrison on Gilbert White, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne

For someone who writes about nature, as I do, the importance of Gilbert White’s Selborne, coupled with the daily journals he kept from 1751 to 1793, cannot be overestimated. The original...

Shadows of Orkney

Morag MacInnes on Robert Shaw, The Hiding Place

There were, it would seem, as many Robert Shaws as there were parts to play. It was both a blessing and a curse, this catholicity. My Robert Shaw is perhaps less known; but he may be the key to all...

Where There’s a Will

Andrew Lycett on Wilkie Collins, No Name

Both The Woman in White and The Moonstone are clever and absorbing. But where should one go in Collins’s work after them? Armadale is fascinating but dauntingly complex, with its two cousins of the...

A State of Dressing-gown-ness

Tim Blanchard on Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov

Oblomov, which was published in 1859, grew out of an initial sketch, Oblomov’s Dream, a portrait of life on a sleepy country estate, rustic and dilapidated in its rut of feasting and napping and...

Nothing in Moderation

Louisa Yates on E. M. Delafield, Consequences

‘Oh, Alex.’ I suspect many readers of E. M. Delafield’s fourth novel, Consequences (1919), have said this aloud at least once. They may have said it in sorrowful sympathy; they may have...

Ambassadress Extraordinaire

Roger Hudson on the letters of Harriet, Countess Granville

Hary-O, as she was called, was born in 1785 to the beautiful Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire and incurable gambler, and the 5th Duke, who seems to have passed his life largely disengaged from his...

One Man and His Dog

Shena Mackay on Alfred Ollivant, Owd Bob

My raddled copy of Owd Bob: The Grey Dog of Kenmuir, with its broken spine and pages falling out, sits in my bookcase alongside other lifelong companions such as Come Hither (which I was delighted to...

Outrunning Darkness

Simon Willlis on Robert Walser, The Walk

Scanning the contents page, I could see that these were tiny stories about everyday subjects, most no more than a couple of pages long – prose sketches rather than conventional narratives – with...

‘Is there any news of the iceberg?’

C. J. Wright on the archives of Punch

Alan Coren was on fire. Or, at least, smoking. He was also ablaze with enthusiasm. In due course, the cigarette was extinguished. The enthusiasm was not. It was 2004 and he had come to see the...