Slightly Foxed – The Real Reader's Quarterly

Crossword

Slightly Foxed readers were invited to test their literary skills with our crossword in the Winter issue and judging by the hundreds of correct entries we received you truly are a literary lot! Here are the answers.

Across

1 Just beat Miss Woodhouse after noon (3,4) PIP EMMA

7 see 9 across

9, 7 She was penned by a horseman, exhausted (5,7) RIDER HAGGARD

10 Yosser, Dixie, George and Chrissie: his able lads exploded with energy (9) BLEASDALE

11 Irish flower for Tennessee Williams’s Larry (7) SHANNON

14 New Englanders seek any resort (7) YANKEES

16 His Norman lady is welcome, but flare flickers after puff of wind (7,8) GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

18 One caught in thicket, a one caught by the tongue (7) ARAMAIC

20 A clicky true, he might have said (7) SPOONER

22 In us all we turn to a Welsh poet (4,5) ALUN LEWIS

25 I give a card to Wilde’s husband (5) IDEAL

27 John’s mother on a reel, spinning (7)ELEANOR

28, 16 down Strange Thames hankering; energy needed for author of river idyll (7,7) KENNETH GRAHAME

Down

1 Copied from new map edition (4) APED

2 Old essayist needs a doctor after fifty (4) LAMB

3 Happy, almost in heaven, Chas and Ed gave Nick a job (10) CHEERYBLES

4 Encourages breakfast being cooked? (4,2) EGGS ON

5 One seduced Helen, another loved Juliet (5) PARIS

6 Tempestuous woman? Yes and no (7) MIRANDA

8 Sunken river dog, say, swallows shilling (4-3) DEEP SET

12 Italian city goes back in a format so alpine (5) AOSTA

13 His hay fever, a feverish Cold War one (4,6) NOEL COWARD

15 Free-hitting batsman has this – probably two of them (3,2) EYE IN

16 see 28 across

17 Moreish? (7) UTOPIAN

19 Unwell, not succeeding, capital gone (6) AILING

21 Udall’s blustering coward inside a regular alpha male (5) RALPH

23 Benefits of ownership, like Hoggart’s of literacy (4) USES

24 His Bassington – such a kind individual at the start? Not so (4) SAKI

26 Steinbeck’s Trasks east of this project (4) EDEN

February 2010

The shop will be undergoing refurbishment this month and, for one week from 21 February to 1March, will have to close. We’ve very excited at the prospect of these improvements and look forward to welcoming you when they are complete. Among other changes will be some marvellous displays of cards, wood-engravings and new books.

Please visit the shop website for more information.

The High Path

In his prizewinning memoir The High Path, Ted Walker recreates with unusual vividness his secure, happy childhood in the England of the Thirties and Forties, and the influences that made a working-class boy into a poet.

Most telling, perhaps, was his relationship with his father, a carpenter who had come to the Sussex coast from Birmingham in search of work before Ted’s birth. The affection between the two shines out from the tender portrait of him, cruising the last mile home from work on his Ariel motorbike, playing backyard cricket with typical concentration, or struggling to master French with Ted, urged on by their loveably eccentric teacher Mr Jupp.

A sense of history came from magical visits to his father’s family in the Worcestershire countryside, and sensuous pleasure from the grocer’s shop managed by ‘Grandad Harry’ – an Aladdin’s Cave where ‘a wondrous blend of smells: nutmeg and cinnamon, dog biscuits and bran, wax polish, ripe cheese and Brasso all harmonized to give a sense of good things kept in spotless order’. It is a picture of a proud and thrifty working-class world now utterly lost.

With grammar school and a place at university a gap began to open between Ted and his parents. These new experiences brought intellectual confusion, romantic longing, sexual frustration, but the warmth of his happy childhood was still his bedrock. The High Path is a beautiful book, written with all the honesty and sensitivity of the poet Ted Walker became.

Slightly Foxed 25

Belinda Hollyer finds an orange grove in Florida • Christian Tyler stops at Eboli • Lawrence Sail takes the high path • Michele Hanson meets a bounty-hunter • Ashley Harrold goes literary speed-dating • Rohan Candappa escapes to Brendon Chase • Hugh Farmar asks if enough is enough • Laurence Scott gets out his Observer’s book

January 2010

Well we’re slowly getting back to real life following the Christmas break although things have been rather hampered by the weather. Those of us in London have been slipping and sliding to work and with Gail holed up on Dartmoor, Steph snowed in in Hampshire with no power and Hazel hunkering down in icy Highbury we’re a rather far-flung (but still cheery!) team.

In weather like this, there’s nothing quite like SF to curl up with and we recommend you do so, in a comfy chair in front of a fire if possible. Or if you’ve already devoured the latest issue, there’s our new Slightly Foxed Edition, James Lees-Milne’s Another Self to keep you occupied.

And finally, here’s another small but very nice mention of our bookshop in the Times.

Nicholas Clee in the Times

It’s official . . .

A gift subscription to Slightly Foxed is (according to the Daily Telegraph’s ultimate gift guide 2009) one of the top ten gifts ‘for him’! We think a subscription to SF makes a great gift for any book lover really but we’re very pleased to be mentioned.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/christmas/christmas-gift-ideas/6826564/Christmas-2009-the-ultimate-gift-guide-for-him.html

December 2009

Well, the party season is upon us and Christmas is fast approaching. We’ve had our first Christmas card (from a subscriber!) and spent a delightful evening with local subscribers at The Old Harlotry in Canterbury to launch our Winter issue.

Now it’s no more parties for the time being and all hands to the deck to get gift-wrapped copies of the Winter issue, books and back issues off in time for Christmas. We’ve got quite a production line of ribbon-tying, parcel-wrapping, card-writing, envelope-stuffing and posting (not to mention dog-walking and tea-making) on the go.

We’re also having fun planning the shop’s New Year facelift and have been thrilled to hear nice things about both the shop and SF from the literary world.

Robert McCrum in the Guardian

Boyd Tonkin in the Independent

Slightly Foxed 24

Maggie Fergusson drops in on 84 Charing Cross Road • Quentin Blake and Travis Elborough celebrate the fox • Oliver Pritchett recites rude rhymes in the bath • Grant McIntyre recalls another self • Roger Hudson cherishes Mr Pepys • Michael Barber returns to the murky world of Eric Ambler • Andrew Lycett reads a double life • Sue Gee visits a little house at the edge of the wood

We’re thrilled to have Quentin Blake as our Winter 2009 cover artist.

November 2009

Sighs of relief at SF Towers this morning as we heard the news that the Royal Mail won’t be striking again before Christmas. We were even more cheered when Brian (our man with a van) arrived from the printers with our Winter leaflets and new stationery for the bookshop. We’re already looking forward to Brian’s next visit in a couple of weeks’ time when the new Slightly Foxed Edition, James Lees-Milne’s Another Self, is due to be delivered. If you’d like to order your copy now, we’ll dispatch it to you as soon as stock arrives.

Buy Another Self

Another Self

James Lees-Milne, writer and architectural historian, is probably best remembered for his mischievously perceptive diaries, which chronicled the doings of upper-class English society from the Second World War onwards in twelve addictive volumes. Another Self, his fanciful, funny, yet poignant account of his early years, has the same gripping quality.

A deeply religious child, Jim spent much of his boyhood wandering dreamily in the grounds of his parents’ medieval manor house in Wickhamford, Worcestershire. It gave him a nostalgia for the past and a love of historic buildings which would lead to his later distinguished career with the National Trust.

His father, however, had no time whatsoever for such arty attitudes. He determined that, after leaving Eton in 1926, Jim should ‘stand on his own feet’ and accordingly enrolled him in Miss Blakeney’s Stenography School for Young Ladies in Chelsea where, as the only male student, he spent a lonely year learning shorthand and typing. Thanks to his mother he escaped to Oxford (a disappointment) and thence to London, where he had another searing experience as assistant to Sir Roderick Jones, the boorish and dyspeptic chairman of Reuters. Droll, shy and sexually ambivalent, Lees-Milne wrote that he ‘always felt an outsider in every circle’. It was this, combined with his eye for detail and highly developed sense of the ridiculous, that made him such a wonderful comic writer. John Betjeman compared the impact of Another Self to that of Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall.