Greetings from Slightly Foxed. With Father’s Day on the horizon we thought some of you may appreciate a few present ideas for the father figures in your lives or, indeed, anyone you’d like to show your appreciation for at this time of year.
The Slightly Foxed backlist is full of eccentric, interesting, loving, challenging, and doting dads but we’d like to share with you a small segment of a particularly touching parental portrait in the form of Anne Fadiman’s The Wine Lover’s Daughter. This title, though, observes Adam Sisman in his preface to our edition, ‘is a misnomer; The Wine Loving Father is a more obvious description – though of course, in telling us about her father, she also tells us about herself.’ First published in the US in 2017, The Wine Lover’s Daughter is now a minor classic, one which will resonate with fathers and daughters, booklovers and wine-lovers, everywhere.
Please read on for an extract from The Wine Lover’s Daughter, as well as the aforementioned bookish gift suggestions. Should inspiration strike, your present can be sent off to the recipient, or to you to hand over in person, in good time for Sunday 18 June. And if you’re worried about delivery times, you can also choose to have an instant gift card sent to you to print out at home or sent straight to the recipient by email.
For anyone who’d like to spread some bookish joy any time in the next two weeks, we’re offering free gift wrap for all orders of £10 or more when you quote the promotional code GIFTWRAP at the final stage of the checkout or over the phone. As always, we’ve plenty of handsome gift cards, reams of brown paper and our understated cream ribbon to hand, and we’re ready to wrap our socks off!
With best wishes, as always, from the SF office staff
Hattie, Jess & Jemima
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1
Thwick
My father was a lousy driver and a two-finger typist, but he could open a wine bottle as deftly as any swain ever undressed his lover. Nearly every evening of my childhood, I watched him cut the capsule – the foil sleeve that sheathes the bottleneck – with a sharp knife. Then he plunged the bore of a butterfly corkscrew into the exact center of the cork, twirled the handle, and, after the brass levers rose like two supplicant arms, pushed them down and gently twisted out the cork. Its pop was satisfying but restrained, not the fustian whoop of a champagne cork but a well-bred thwick. He once said that the cork was one of three inventions that had proved unequivocally beneficial to the human race. (The others were the wheel and Kleenex.)
If the wine was old, he poured it into a crystal decanter, slowing at the finish to make sure the sediment stayed in the bottle. If it was young, he set the bottle in a napkin-swathed silver cradle to ‘breathe’: one of several words, along with ‘nose’ and ‘legs’ and ‘full-bodied’, that made wine sound more like a person than a thing. Our food was served – looking back, I can hardly believe I once accepted this as a matter of course – by a uniformed cook who ate alone in the kitchen and was summoned by an electric bell screwed to the underside of the dinner table just above my mother’s right knee. But my father always poured the wine himself. The glasses were clear and thin-stemmed, their bowls round and generous for reds, narrow and upright for whites. (Had he lived long enough to see Sideways, he would immediately have recognized that the wine-snob hero was seriously depressed: only thoughts of suicide could drive someone to drink a Cheval Blanc ’61 from a Styrofoam cup.) He swirled the wine, sniffed it, sipped it, swished it, and, ecstatically narrowing his eyes, swallowed it – a swallow that, as he put it, led ‘a triple life: one in the mouth, another in the course of slipping down the gullet, still another, a beautiful ghost, the moment afterward’.
My father, Clifton Fadiman, was a writer, and that erotically charged description is from a 1957 essay called ‘Brief History of a Love Affair’. When I was ten or so, I spotted the title in the table of contents in one of his books, eagerly flipped to p.133, and was grievously disappointed to discover, in the fourth paragraph, that the lover in question was not a woman but a liquid . . .
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In this beautiful and original memoir Luke Jennings describes how he developed a passion for fly fishing, with the help of books and the encouragement of his two boyhood heroes – his father, awarded the Military Cross for bravery, and Robert Nairac, a charismatic teacher. Fishing and friendship are woven together to produce a book of unusual subtlety that’s about a great deal more than fishing.
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In the 1940s Charles Phillipson wrote a series of 150 illustrated letters to his young son Michael, who had just started school. These delightful, quirky letters, designed to whet Michael’s appetite for reading, and are full of the lightness and humour Charles found in everyday situations. These letters paint a most touching portrait of the relationship between a father and his young son.
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The subtitle to this delicious book is ‘A Chronicle of an Unusual Friendship’, and it would indeed be difficult to imagine two more unlikely companions than the naïve young Christopher Robbins and his subject, 80-year-old eccentric Irish film-maker Brian Desmond Hurst. First introduced to Hurst as a possible scriptwriter; the film in question was never made, Robbins was never paid and the script was never finished. But he learned much from this wickedly unapologetic old rogue and, in The Empress of Ireland, produced a comic masterpiece.
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Who would have thought that the adventurous traveller and decorated wartime hero Eric Newby had started his working life in the rag trade? In this characteristically jaunty and very funny book, Eric blundered his way through various departments at Lane & Newby, ‘Mantle Manufacturers and Wholesale Costumiers’. But things were beginning to go wrong. Eric’s father, an Edwardian patriarch with a light-hearted attitude to accounting, had been running up debts. Fortunately, Eric was already laying plans for an excursion to the Hindu Kush – and the rest is travel history.
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Dame Hilary Mantel grew up in Manchester, a clever, imaginative little girl, alert to adult atmospheres and overheard, half-understood conversations, and to strange, inexplicable presences she sensed around her. Giving up the Ghost is a compulsively readable and ultimately optimistic account of what made Mantel the writer she became, full of courage, insight and wry humour. Mantel, Maggie Fergusson notes in her preface to our edition, ‘never intended to write a memoir, and that it came about almost by accident. The sale of a weekend cottage in Norfolk moved her to write about the death of her stepfather, and from there “the whole story of my life began to unravel” . . .’
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‘Variety, the unexpected, a bit of vulgarity and the ridiculous mixed in with the elevated,’ has been Roger Hudson’s recipe in compiling this commonplace book from material he’s gathered over the past 40 years. And that is what we are given in this wide-ranging collection by a well-read man with a sharp eye, an ironic – indeed very English – sense of humour and a devotion to history. Ranging over the centuries, it contains a rich mix of often arresting facts, vivid descriptions, absurd observations and wise words. Altogether a book for the times and a perfect present for a thoughtful and humorous bookworm. It may even inspire you to start a commonplace book of your own.
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SPECIAL OFFER
Enter the code GIFTWRAP in the promotional code field at the final stage of the online checkout to claim complimentary gift wrap – sent with a card bearing a handwritten message of your choice – when you spend £10 or more.
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Each issue offers 96 pages of personal recommendations for books old and new ‒ novels, travel, memoirs, history, poetry, children’s books, letters, cookery, and more ‒ that have stood the test of time and have left their mark on the people who write about them. An annual subscription, or even a single issue, would make for an inspired gift for any book lover.
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