Slightly Foxed Issue 49

Slightly Foxed Issue 49: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

As everyone who lives here knows, spring in London doesn’t just signal daffodils in window boxes and budding trees in squares. It signals building projects. The whole city seems to be in a state of...

Heylor, Shetland

Claire Dalby

Robert Macfarlane delights in dialect and explores the landscape of language in Slightly Foxed Issue 49, accompanied by Claire Dalby’s woodcut of Heylor, Shetland.

Her name was Muriel Haidée Perry . . .

Diana Petre, The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerley

Her name was Muriel Haidée Perry and she was born on 5 March 1890, or so I believed when I went to Somerset House to look up the registration of her birth. It wasn’t there. What I was really...

The Spell of Stout Angus

Robert Macfarlane on James Stout Angus, A Glossary of the Shetland Dialect

In a poem written near the end of his life, W. S. Graham imagined himself as a ‘wordy ghost’, ‘floating across the frozen tundra / of the lexicon and the dictionary’. Like Graham – like...

June News: The Word-Hoard – Love Letters to Our Land

At this time of year, the build-up of desket syndrome at SF HQ is increasingly problematic, and the prospect of escaping the city for a dose of the natural world becomes more appealing by the day....

Evasions and Deceits

Peter Parker, Preface to Diana Petre, The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerley

Among the small horde of papers Diana Petre left me as her literary executor when she died in 2001 was a folder labelled: ‘Excuses. Lies. Evasions. Deceits.’ I thought at first that it might...

Slightly Foxed Issue 49: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

As everyone who lives here knows, spring in London doesn’t just signal daffodils in window boxes and budding trees in squares. It signals building projects. The whole city seems to be in a state of...

The Sadness of Mrs Bridge

William Palmer on Evan S. Connell, Mrs Bridge

As a fan of early jazz, I’ve read a great deal about Kansas City as it was in the 1930s. A most attractive place it seems in retrospect, of twenty-four-hour drinking and gambling, to the...

Murder at the Majestic

Patrick Welland on J. G. Farrell, Troubles

On 11 August 1979, a humane and singular man, who after long periods punctuated by adversity declared himself ‘happier than I’ve been in years’, left his isolated cottage near Bantry Bay in the...

All for Art

Helena Drysdale on Alison Lurie, Real People

What a perfect basis for a novel: hole up some highly charged ‘creatives’ in a secluded location and propel them from Eden into a Sartrean existentialist hell. Published in 1969, Real People is a...

Joyce to the Life

Margaret Drabble on Richard Ellman, James Joyce

I have the clearest recollection of my first reading of Richard Ellmann’s life of James Joyce. I have just reread it, from cover to cover and from footnote to footnote, for the second time. And, at...

Learning from the Wilderness

Galen O’Hanlon on Ronald Welch, Mohawk Valley

You should never camp in a ravine. Look for higher ground, and a windbreak – a fallen tree is fine, but rocks are the best. Gather balsam wood for bedding, and use your tomahawk to cut firewood...

Birch, Bell and Book

Jonathan Smith on Brian Moore, The Feast of Lupercal

Brian (pronounced Bree-an) Moore started his life in Belfast in 1921 and ended it in Malibu, California, in 1999, and that journey – and all that it implies – is the central thread of his...

Wisdom from the Ivory Tower

Matthew Adams on F. M. Cornford, Microcosmographia Academica: Being a Guide for the Young Academic Politician

The title, which translates as ‘A Study of a Tiny Academic World’, refers to the enclave that was Cambridge University in the 1900s, at which time Cornford was a fellow of classics at Trinity...

Dresden and After

A. F. Harrold on Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 5

Just as I was about to sit down to write this I heard an edition of Radio 4’s A Good Read in which the comedian and writer Richard Herring chose Slaughterhouse 5 (1969), the book I had planned to...

Motorway Madness

Sarah Bakewell on Cortázar & Dunlop, Autonauts of the Cosmoroute

As with many of the books I’ve come to love most, I bought Autonauts of the Cosmoroute (1983) impulsively, knowing nothing about it, and mainly because of its cover. This features a doughty old red...

A Victorian Quartet

Sue Gee on Penelope Fitzgerald, The Knox Brothers

Last spring, I visited the hamlet of Knill, deep in the Herefordshire countryside. Knill lies on the river Lug, a tributary of the Wye, and in the 1930s Penelope Fitzgerald’s father, Eddie Knox,...

Lost Cities

Charles Elliott on John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America

Between 1839 and 1841 John Lloyd Stephens made two long and arduous trips through Central America in search of lost Mayan cities. What followed were two huge books (respectively 900 and 700 pages...

London at War

Juliet Gardiner on Michael MacDonagh, In London during the Great War

Year by year literature of and about the First World War mounts –  books on its campaigns, causes, politics and economics; memoirs by politicians and generals; diaries and letters written by...

Old Devil in a Dog-collar

Linda Leatherbarrow on Lorna Sage, Bad Blood

I first read Lorna Sage’s deeply absorbing and funny memoir Bad Blood in 2001, just before it won the Whitbread Award for Biography. A week later she died of emphysema, aged only 57, and, although...

Getting the Idea

Oliver Pritchett on Inspiration

I wonder what the business was that the person from Porlock wanted to discuss when he (or possibly she) knocked on the door of the isolated farmhouse in Nether Stowey on that day in the summer of...