Slightly Foxed Issue 73

Slightly Foxed Issue 73: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

After a long winter of disruptions, there’s definitely a feeling of spring in the air at Slightly Foxed. We know we’re not out of the woods yet where Covid is concerned, but the start of the year...

A Year in Barsetshire

Daisy Hay on Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire novels

In the spring of 2020, amidst the early devastation of Covid-19, I found myself unable to read. I was grappling with the after-effects of an accident when the pandemic struck, so my concentration was...

On Juniper Hill

Nicola Chester on Flora Thompson, Lark Rise

Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise has always felt like home. A romantic notion, perhaps, from someone brought up in the 1970s and ’80s, rather than a century ago, as Flora was. I first read it when I...

A Glorious Menagerie

Anne Boston on Philippe Germond & Jacques Livet, An Egyptian Bestiary

‘Of all the civilizations of the ancient world, none enjoyed such a close and significant relationship with the animal realm as that of the ancient Egyptians.’ So Philippe Germond, an...

No Moral Compass

Gustav Temple on Patricia Highsmith, This Sweet Sickness

During the first year of lockdown I decided to read the entire canon of Patricia Highsmith. I’d read The Talented Mr Ripley, but I wanted to see what the less famous novels were like. I would not,...

Fulmar, Gannet and Puffin

Maggie Fergusson on Karin Altenberg, Island of Wings

In shelves to the left and right of the fireplace in our dining-room, my husband keeps an extensive collection of books about Scotland. Half a shelf is given over to volumes on St Kilda. If ever I...

The Art of Bookselling

Chris Saunders, Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop

Just as most good books aren’t really about the things they say they are, Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop (1978) isn’t really about a bookshop. It’s about English insularity, politics, the...

Not So Verray Parfit

Sue Gaisford on Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Knight’s Tale’

I once taught English at a girls’ school in which the head of depart­ment didn’t like poetry. It’s an odd aversion but it worked well for me. The poetry room was right at the top of a very...

Fresh as Paint

Ariane Bankes on Julian Trevelyan, Indigo Days

My brother, my sister and I grew up in a rambling farmhouse in Hampshire hung with pictures by friends of our parents, for they knew a wide range of artists and tended, naturally, to buy works by...

Hammering Away at Words

Andrew Nixon on the stories of Frank Key

‘Why do I feel as if the Earth is disappearing from under my feet?’ was the reaction of one friend when I introduced him to Hooting Yard, the ‘nonsense’ literary universe created by that most...

A Classical Mosaic

Daisy Dunn on Mary Renault, The Last of the Wine

Alexias was an unwanted child. When he was born, a month prema­ture, his father took one look at his small, fragile frame and decided that he was the product of an inauspicious age and that it would...

Following the Music

Suzi Feay on Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams

As deputy literary editor of the Independent on Sunday in the mid-1990s, it was my job to organize and compile several of the routine book columns and features every week. One such was the...

The Sins of the Father

Helen MacEwan on Vyvyan Holland, Son of Oscar Wilde

A. A. Milne’s son musing with mixed feelings on his childhood as ‘Christopher Robin’; Daphne du Maurier’s daughter recalling life at Menabilly, the model for Rebecca’s Manderley . . ....

Writing under Occupation

Tim Pears on Ivo Andrić, Bosnian Chronicle

Many writers reported finding it hard to focus during the Covid lockdowns, beset as they were by anxiety and feelings of futility. Eighty years ago, a writer produced remarkable novels under a far...

A Fresh Take on the '45

Ursula Buchan on Violet Jacob, Flemington

Flemington by Violet Jacob was recommended to me by my grand­parents. Posthumously. When writing my biography of John Buchan, I came across a letter he wrote in 1911 to the author, soon after the...

Joy Undimmed

Mathew Lyons on John Masefield, The Midnight Folk

John Masefield was in his last year as Poet Laureate when I was born in 1966. I remember copying out his poem ‘Cargoes’ in primary school – ‘Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir . . .’...

Through a Glass, Madly

Martin Sorrell on Miguel Cervantes and the Glass Delusion

In my day, the A-level Spanish syllabus included a few score of the key pages of Don Quijote – windmills mistaken for giants, labourers for lords, prostitutes for princesses, and so on. When I got...

Cover Artist: Slightly Foxed Issue 73, Sandra Graham, ‘River Rea, 2021’