Slightly Foxed Issue 76

Slightly Foxed Issue 76: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

This issue of Slightly Foxed comes with our very best wishes to you all from all of us here for Christmas and the coming year. However there’s no escaping the fact that these are anxious times, and...

‘String is my foible’

Felicity James on Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford

A tarnished silver teapot. A tin of buttons, their parent garments long decayed. A bundle of yellowing letters, in my mother’s hand. Look: here she is, smiling in her nurse’s uniform in the...

Shall I Be Me?

Derek Parker on Colin Clark, The Prince, the Showgirl and Me

In the summer of 1953, briefly in London during the Coronation celebrations, I took myself to the Phoenix theatre (Upper Circle, 6s.) to see The Sleeping Prince, with the two glittering stars of the...

Uncle Quentin Revisited

Tom Hodgkinson on Enid Blyton, Five on Kirrin Island Again

When I was 4 my parents took me to a junk shop in Richmond. They saw me examining a musty red hardback and asked if I’d like to buy it. It was Five on Kirrin Island Again (1947), the sixth in Enid...

Surprised by Joy

Kristian Doyle on Adam Zagajewski, Slight Exaggeration

In the obituaries that appeared in 2021 for the Polish writer Adam Zagajewski, his prose, I was saddened to see, hardly got a mention. I suppose this is common with poets: their poetry is seen as the...

A Northern Survivor

Pamela Beasant on Stromness Books & Prints, Orkney

Nestled in the heart of Orkney’s second largest town, on a main street uncoiling, as the Orcadian poet and writer George Mackay Brown described it, ‘like a sailor’s rope’, Stromness Books &...

Double Trouble

Anthony Gardner on Anthony Hope, The Prisoner of Zenda

Duelling was a daily feature of my prep-school life. Our swords were wooden rulers; chipped and battered desks served as castle battle­ments. Modern warfare held a fascination too, but when it came...

. . . from the Trees

Isabel Lloyd on books about trees, Part II

In Issue 75, I said some books help you grow. Others help you let go. Our son was 17 when he disappeared. I’ll call him R. We bought our place that was big enough to plant trees when he was 14....

A Recording Angel

Anthony Quinn on Geoffrey Fletcher, The London Nobody Knows

From the long shelf of books about London that I keep (and keep adding to) the one I most cherish is The London Nobody Knows. Published sixty years ago, it is part whimsical vade mecum, part urban...

The Thread that Binds Them

Ursula Buchan on A. P. Wavell (ed.), Other Men’s Flowers

Some years ago, when writing a gardening article for an achingly right-on newspaper, I used the expression ‘other men’s flowers’. I cannot now remember in what context but I have not forgotten...

Reaping the Whirlwind

Richard Platt on William Safire, Freedom

A warm summer day in 1987. A thump on my doorstep announces the arrival of a stout parcel with the familiar return address, BOMC, Book-of-the-Month Club. These were the pre-Internet days, when BOMC...

The Sweetest Note of All Others

William Palmer on David Lack, The Life of the Robin

Most of the houses of East Sheen in south-west London were built on farmland as part of the great explosion of suburbia between the 1890s and 1930s. The houses are solid and the rear gardens long....

Quick Brains and Slow Tongues

Mathew Lyons on the short stories of Damon Runyon

My parents are both now dead. My father died last, aged 90, in 2016. I had always associated my love of books with my mother’s influence. My father’s passing, however, made me realize – too...

A Friendly Looking Lot

Posy Fallowfield on the children’s stories of Shirley Hughes

When I was 6 I broke my arm and had to go to hospital to have it set in plaster of Paris. All this, both the breaking and the setting, made for an eventful day. When I got home there on the table was...

An Olympian Scoundrel

Jonathan Law on Bernard Wasserstein, The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln

It’s a funny thing, humour. What makes you laugh out loud may leave me with a face like an Easter Island statue. In my own experi­ence the funniest books are non-fiction, and most of these are...

Mr Gryce Meets His Match

Kate Tyte on Anna Katharine Green, That Affair Next Door

Imagine you are at a pub quiz. It’s the literature round and the theme is literary firsts. What was the first novel in English? What was the first detective story? Readers of Slightly Foxed could...

Twice Upon a Time

Alastair Glegg on fairy tales for grown-ups

Starting a story with ‘Once upon a time’ does not guarantee a happy ending. In their classic collection of folk tales, the rather aptly named Brothers Grimm made sure there was a moral to every...

Cover Artist: Slightly Foxed Issue 76, John Broadley, ‘Time at the Fox Inn’