Slightly Foxed Issue 70

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The independent-minded quarterly that combines good looks, good writing and a personal approach. Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal. Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it’s more like a well-read friend than a literary magazine.

In this issue: Tim Mackintosh-Smith returns to Burgess’s Malaya • Margaret von Klemperer climbs Mount Kenya • David Gilmour is delighted by Tunbridge Wells • Olivia Potts learns from a home cook • Jim Ring takes the tiller with the Coot Club • Amanda Theunissen sets out for Trebizond • Jonathan Smith meets Silas Marner • Lesley Downer goes language-hunting in the Karakorum • Jonathan Keates revisits John Moore’s England, and much more besides . . .

Tigers at the Double Lion • TIM MACKINTOSH-SMITH on Anthony Burgess’s Malayan trilogy

‘Delighted’ of Tunbridge Wells • DAVID GILMOUR on Richard Cobb, Still Life

Food without Shame • OLIVIA POTTS on Laurie Colwin’s cookery books

When in Rome . . . • ROBIN BLAKE on Robert Graves, I, Claudius & Claudius the God

The Shining City • AMANDA THEUNISSEN on Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond

All’s Well that Ends Well • JIM RING on Arthur Ransome, Coot Club & The Big Six

An American Childhood • MARKIE ROBSON-SCOTT on Eda Lord, Childsplay

England, Their England • JONATHAN KEATES on John Moore, The Waters under the Earth

Unravelling Burushaski • LESLEY DOWNER on E. O. Lorimer, Language Hunting in the Karakorum

The Joy of Sex • DEREK PARKER on The memoirs of Casanova

A Place to Call His Own • SUE GEE on V. S. Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas

Peak Experience • MARGARET VON KLEMPERER on Felice Benuzzi, No Picnic on Mount Kenya

Wheels of Fortune • JONATHAN SMITH on George Eliot, Silas Marner

What We Have Lost • JIM CRUMLEY on Gavin Maxwell, Ring of Bright Water

Hearing Distant Thunder • GILLIAN TINDALL on The novels of Rachel Ferguson

What’s in a Name? • ANTHONY QUINN on naming fictional characters

About Slightly Foxed

The independent-minded quarterly that combines good looks, good writing and a personal approach. Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal. Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it’s more like a well-read friend than a literary magazine. Read more about Slightly Foxed.

‘A quarterly full of delights and articles about books new and old, published and out of print, beautifully illustrated and written by excellent authors.’ Random Jottings

Slightly Foxed Issue 70: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

Looking back over the past strange and difficult months, it’s cheering to see some of the good things that have come out of the ‘new normal’. One is Bookshop.org, a website launched last autumn...

Tigers at the Double Lion

Tim Mackintosh-Smith on Anthony Burgess's Malayan trilogy

While staying recently in Chiswick, I went on a literary pilgrimage to Glebe Street, where Anthony Burgess and his wife Lynn lived in the 1960s. I wasn’t sure what I would do when I got to No. 24....

‘Delighted’ of Tunbridge Wells

David Gilmour on Richard Cobb, Still Life

Richard Cobb’s first book in English was A Second Identity (1969), a title he chose to show how a middle-class Englishman became not just a historian of France but a historian who effectively...

Food without Shame

Olivia Potts on Laurie Colwin’s cookery books

In my baking cupboard, at the very back of the top shelf, there is an open bag of wheatgerm. It has survived one house move and more than six years of ownership, and it is depleted by only one...

When in Rome . . .

Robin Blake on Robert Graves, I, Claudius & Claudius the God

The two books take the form of the intimate memoirs of Claudius himself, telling of his unlikely ascent to the imperial throne, and his surprisingly successful thirteen-year reign. Previously he had...

The Shining City

Amanda Theunissen on Rose Macaulay’s The Towers of Trebizond

Picture the scene: a heavyweight London literary event in the 1930s. Two well-known women novelists, chatting. ‘My novels won’t live, Ivy,’ says Rose Macaulay to Ivy Compton-Burnett. ‘Yours...

All’s Well That Ends Well

Jim Ring on Arthur Ransome, Coot Club & The Big Six

Children, as any parent will tell you, are innocent beings whose sensibilities it is the first duty of every parent to protect. They are sensitive, impressionable marshmallows, easily swayed, all too...

An American Childhood

Markie Robson-Scott on Eda Lord’s Childsplay

Childsplay was published in 1961. It was Eda Lord’s first novel, though now it would probably be called a memoir, and is an account of her childhood (the first-person narrator is unnamed), starting...

England, Their England

Jonathan Keates on John Moore, The Waters under the Earth

At the time of writing, the town of Tewkesbury, in the north-west corner of Gloucestershire, has been cut off by the flooding of its four rivers: the Severn and Avon, at whose confluence it stands,...

Unravelling Burushaski

Lesley Downer on E. O. Lorimer, Language Hunting in the Karakorum

When I was young I thought I knew exactly where the real Shangri-La was. It was the land of Hunza, in north-west Pakistan, or if not, then Gilgit or Chitral, and those magical names remained with me...

The Joy of Sex

Derek Parker on the memoirs of Casanova

In the late 1780s the librarian at the Bohemian castle of Dux, fifty miles from Prague, was trying to finish his autobiography. His employer, Count Joseph Karl von Waldstein, chamberlain to the...

A Place to Call His Own

Sue Gee on V. S. Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas

‘He had thought deeply about this house, and knew exactly what he wanted. He wanted, in the first place, a real house, made with real materials. He didn’t want mud for walls, earth for floor,...

Peak Experience

Margaret von Klemperer on Felice Benuzzi, No Picnic on Mount Kenya

I have a childhood memory of being ill in bed, bored and grumpy until my mother came up with an idea of genius. This must have been in late 1953 or 1954 because we had a children’s version of The...

Wheels of Fortune

Jonathan Smith on George Eliot, Silas Marner

When publicly embarrassed by how poorly read I am, and especially so when being pressed by my family, I often claim to be rereading a book because ‘it’s so many years now since I first came...

What We Have Lost

Jim Crumley on Gavin Maxwell, Ring of Bright Water

Ring of Bright Water caught me off guard. Gavin Maxwell’s memorial to a year of his life shared with an otter and glorious secular hymn to the West Highland seaboard of Scotland hit me between the...

Hearing Distant Thunder

Gillian Tindall on the novels of Rachel Ferguson

A friend at college many decades ago was the daughter of a respected Kensington GP who was deeply involved in the history of the area. On one occasion when I was visiting she mentioned that her...

What’s in a Name?

Anthony Quinn on naming fictional characters

I was once interviewing Kingsley Amis when he mused, apropos of nothing, ‘Quinn . . . a Manx name, isn’t it?’ I mumbled that I thought it was Irish myself, since that’s where my forebears...