Slightly Foxed Issue 69

Slightly Foxed Issue 69: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

How cheering it is to see that there are signs of spring now both in the air and in the step of the people walking along Old Street and in the little streets around Hoxton Square. It feels as if...

The Pram in the Hall

Laura Freeman on Barbara Hepworth, A Pictorial Autobiography

I lent my copy of Barbara Hepworth’s A Pictorial Autobiography to an illustrator friend who, for reasons of distance and diaries, I rarely see. We had been talking about children and creativity and...

Before the Slaughter

Justin Marozzi on Laurie Lee, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

How much we miss movement in our suddenly still, stay-at-home pandemic era. Gone the footloose and fancy-free travel of our rose tinted imaginations, replaced by domestic gloom, pessimistic prospects...

Growing Pains

Martin Sorrell on Fred Uhlman, Reunion

An annual pre-Christmas treat for me is discovering which books have impressed the great and the good of the literary world over the previous twelve months. The lists in the heavyweight papers...

Lyndon B. Johnson, Dad and Me

Andy Merrills on Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson

In the end, it was no surprise that I turned to books in the aftermath of my father’s death; as much as anything else, a love of reading, and a confidence in the calming power of the written word,...

The Nightmare of Room 101

Christopher Rush on George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen. That first arresting sentence of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four transports us immediately into a world that is real enough...

Murder and Walnut Cake

Julie Welch on Hazel Holt’s Mrs Malory crime novels

‘For my son Tom. Since it was a vain attempt to match his prodigious literary output that got me into this situation in the first place.’ This slightly gushy (and therefore untypical)...

Torrington’s Tours

Roger Hudson on the diaries of John Byng, Lord Torrington

The Great North Road, the A1, bypasses the villages that used to punctuate it and so misses out on the inns where John Byng, Lord Torrington, regularly used to stay on his touring holidays during the...

The Torrington Diaries

Roger Hudson, An Appendix to Lord Torrington’s Diaries

There wasn’t space to include all the intriguing background information provided by Roger Hudson for his piece on ‘Torrington’s Tours’ which appeared in Issue 69. So we thought we’d share...

Love at First Sight

Charles Hebbert on the novels of Antal Szerb

At a loose end after university in the 1980s I went to Budapest to learn Hungarian. My teacher gave our group a Hungarian novel from which we studied passages in class. It was a slim book with an...

Thank You, Dr Spock

Alice Jolly on Benjamin Spock, Dr Spock’s Baby and Child Care

A night in the autumn of 2002. I am woken by a scream which threatens to blow the chimneys off the house. I rush into the next room, pick up my 3-month-old son and do my best to comfort him. His tiny...

Judgement Day

C. J. Driver on J. L. Carr, A Month in the Country

After a lifetime of teaching English literature, I have accumulated a private and rather eclectic pantheon of great (mainly modern) novels, in which J. L. Carr’s A Month in the Country holds a...

Light in the Dark Ages

Sue Gaisford on Rosemary Sutcliff, Dawn Wind

Nobody likes losing a pet. But for Owain it is the very last straw. His father and his older brother were killed in the last great battle against the invading Saxons, a battle which he himself barely...

A Kind of Cosmic Refugee

Nigel Andrew on the novels of Julia Strachey

Julia Strachey was a writer of rare talent and originality who, in a lifetime of writing, managed to complete and publish only two novels and a number of sketches and short stories. I knew nothing of...

Walking for the Sun and the Wind

Chris Saunders on Stephen Graham, The Gentle Art of Tramping

I think we can all agree on the restorative qualities of a country walk. Certainly, since I moved to Sussex, I have come to value walking as much more than a basic mode of transport, surrounded as I...

Bruised, Shocked, but Elated

Selina Hastings on Sybille Bedford, A Visit to Don Otavio

I first met Sybille Bedford in London in the early 1980s when an old friend of mine, Patrick Woodcock, who at the time was Sybille’s doctor, invited us both to dinner. As a keen admirer of...

The Great Self-Examiner

Anthony Wells on the essays of Michel de Montaigne

Can anyone reconcile us with death? Michel de Montaigne, one of the great sages of the Renaissance, tried his best; and he was trying to reconcile himself as much as any readers he might have....

Making a Meal of It

Ysenda Maxtone Graham on Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine

Plot: towards lunchtime, a male employee in a large corporate office building (the first-person narrator) discovers that the shoelace of his left shoe has snapped precisely twenty-eight hours after...

Shelving My Assumptions

Ursula Buchan on volunteering in a local public library

Last year, in response to a public consultation on the viability of my local public library, I offered to volunteer my unskilled services every Friday afternoon. This was my small way of signalling...

Cover Artist: Slightly Foxed Issue 69, Niki Bowers, ‘“Spring Green” Tulips’