Slightly Foxed Issue 59 (Autumn) From£13 Gift wrap available Subscriber discount In stock Add to Basket
Belief in the Blood Alexander Lucie-Smith on Antoine François Prévost, Manon Lescaut If it had not been for Puccini’s opera, I would never have heard of Manon Lescaut. As it was, finding a copy of the novel behind the opera wasn’t easy: it was not kept on the open shelves in my public library, but locked away; and the basilisk stare with which the librarian gave me my copy left me in no doubt that this was a work of the utmost depravity.
Don’t Give up the Day Job Frances Donnelly on Graham Greene, Stamboul Train If there were teenage novels in the 1950s, I never found them. Instead the gap between Last Term at Malory Towers and the foothills of serious literature was plugged, most enjoyably, by period adventure stories. Two types appealed. In the first, fair-haired young Englishmen, armed only with a first-class degree from Cambridge and ‘a little Hindustani’, became unwilling players in the Great Game on the North West Frontier. In the second, a rail journey across between-the-wars Europe plunged ordinary men, often from Haslemere, into a maelstrom of violence and treachery.