My father Charles Phillipson would have been amazed and delighted to learn that his series of letters to me, written when I was a small boy, were to be published. No such thought would have occurred to him during the long period of their gestation and delivery . . .
The first sixty or so letters arrived almost daily and had a diary-like quality about them . . . Using his fountain pen filled with blue-black ink Charles dashed off the letters during tea- or lunchbreaks. My mother, recognizing their uniqueness, saved them all. On the pages that follow, though much travelled and slightly crumpled, they now re-emerge, still bursting with life . . .
My father was made redundant in 1955 and from then on received only a small disability pension. But despite the inexorable progress of his disease, he never stopped painting and drawing. ✉️ 🖋️
– from the introduction to Letters to Michael, by Michael Phillipson.
We hope you like this festive clip featuring a specially-recorded reading by the actor Nigel Anthony. 🎄
Click the link below to find out more about Letters to Michael
October 24, 1946
‘My dear Michael
Have you ever been inside the shop of a clock and watch repairer? When you walk in, you find yourself surrounded by clocks and watches of all sorts and sizes, many of them ticking away and sounding like lots of people all talking at once in a small room.
I have tried in my drawing to give you some idea of how it seemed to me when I entered such a shop a few days ago.
Love from Daddy’
.
It is 16 January 1947 and, as he does most days, Charles Phillipson has taken up his fountain pen to write to his young son Michael. Before Michael started school in 1944 Charles had already made him a book of playful drawings of the alphabet to encourage his reading.
From early 1945 to the autumn of 1947 a sequence of 150 illustrated letters followed, creating a series which would, ‘like the Pied Piper’s irresistible sounds’, draw Michael into a world of reading.
Jotted on a sheet torn from a pad of office paper, and often sketched in haste in tea or lunch breaks, each letter was embellished with a hand-drawn stamp which made the young Michael feel as if he was receiving ‘real’ letters. And real letters they are – love-letters, even – for through their affectionate words, mischievous drawings and gentle encouragement of Michael’s own literary and artistic explorations, a father’s love for his son shines out.
Letters to Michael is available from Slightly Foxed.
From £20 inc. p&p | Worldwide shipping
https://foxedquarterly.com/shop/charles-phillipson-letters-to-michael-a-father-writes-to-his-son-1945-1947/
🎧 ‘David at his worst was a liar but John le Carré at his best was a truth teller.’ 🎧 These were the intriguing words with which his biographer Adam Sisman concluded the conversation when he joined the Slightly Foxed Podcast team at the kitchen table to discuss the life and work of the writer who was born David Cornwell but who is better known to the world as John le Carré.
Out now! John le Carré: Secrets & Lies | The Slightly Foxed Podcast Episode 51 🖊️
Graham Greene, whom le Carré greatly admired, once said that ‘an unhappy childhood is an asset for a writer’, and this young David had in spades. He was only 5 when he and his older brother were abandoned by their mother, to be brought up by their father, a domineering, larger-than-life conman, wife-beater and sexual tyrant, whose overwhelming personality would haunt David for the rest of his life and was the inspiration for his novel A Perfect Spy.
These ‘hugless’ childhood years, as David called them, were ones of stark contrasts. At one moment the family would be living like princes, the next bailiffs were in the house and their father might even be in jail. The boys were taught early on to lie convincingly in order to bail their father out, so the scene was set for the kind of double life that David would later lead when he worked for the secret service, and for the shadowy worlds of violence and betrayal that he created in his novels. It also produced a man who sought out danger, both in doing his meticulous research, and in his multiple affairs with women, a subject Adam explored in a second biography, The Secret Life of John Le Carré, published after le Carré’s death. @profile.books
Adam speaks fascinatingly about his often tense relationship with this complex, brilliant and seductively charming man whose great Cold War novels such as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, with their brilliant dialogue and scene-setting and their unforgettable centr
The love of reading is a secret power that feeds a child’s imagination and opens up the world, helping children through hard times and adding to the good ones … Last day to enter our prize draw in aid of @BookTrust | Draw closes tonight (16 Sept 2024)
As many friends and followers will know, this year Slightly Foxed is celebrating twenty years in print. When the magazine turned ten in 2014, we celebrated by raising over £5,500 for Great Ormond Street Hospital School with the proceeds from the sales of a little book of famous people’s drawings of foxes. And now, here we are, hoping to mark our twentieth birthday year by raising up to £20,000 for another good bookish cause: the brilliant BookTrust – the national charity dedicated to getting children reading.
There are 21 covetable prizes from Slightly Foxed, our friends and sponsors worth from £100-£1500 on offer. The draw is open to readers all around the world but overseas friends should please note that a number of the prizes are UK-based trips, stays or tours.
A ginormous thank you to our prize sponsors and to the thousands of you who’ve already bought tickets. We will start drawing the Prizes later this week … Good luck everyone!
Prize Sponsors:
@christenpears of The Reading Party
@jackiemorrisartist
@settlenorfolk
@londonliterarytours
@thewalledgardenschool
@cambridgeimprint
@johnsandoebooks
@gladstoneslibrary
@tomsstudio
@elandpublishing
@jamesnunnart
@lodestarsanthology
@bluebowl.co.uk
Smith Settle
@don.mccullin & @cornucopiamagazine &
@mrbsemporium
@tombunning
@thegrangewine
#bookishfeatures #bookfeature #booklover #bookstagram #readinglist #bookrecommendations #bookgram #bibliophile #mybookfeatures #bookstaexplore #booksofinstagram #literarymagazine #bookaholic #booksbooksbooks #bookgifts #bookishgifts #writersofinstagram #seasonsreadings #bookworm #englishliterature #bookstagrammer #bookaddict #bookcommunity #booktrust #childrenreading #winbooks #prizedraw #lovereading
The love of reading is a secret power that feeds a child’s imagination and opens up the world, helping children through hard times and adding to the good ones … Last hour or so to enter our prize draw in aid of @BookTrust | Draw closes tonight (16 Sept 2024)
As many friends and followers will know, this year Slightly Foxed is celebrating twenty years in print. When the magazine turned ten in 2014, we celebrated by raising over £5,500 for Great Ormond Street Hospital School with the proceeds from the sales of a little book of famous people’s drawings of foxes. And now, here we are, hoping to mark our twentieth birthday year by raising up to £20,000 for another good bookish cause: the brilliant BookTrust – the national charity dedicated to getting children reading.
There are 21 covetable prizes from Slightly Foxed, our friends and sponsors worth from £100-£1500 on offer. The draw is open to readers all around the world but overseas friends should please note that a number of the prizes are UK-based trips, stays or tours.
A ginormous thank you to our prize sponsors and to the thousands of you who’ve already bought tickets. We will start drawing the Prizes tomorrow … Good luck everyone!
Prize Sponsors:
@christenpears of The Reading Party
@jackiemorrisartist
@settlenorfolk
@londonliterarytours
@thewalledgardenschool
@cambridgeimprint
@johnsandoebooks
@gladstoneslibrary
@tomsstudio
@elandpublishing
@jamesnunnart
@lodestarsanthology
@bluebowl.co.uk
Smith Settle
@don.mccullin & @cornucopiamagazine &
@mrbsemporium
@tombunning
@thegrangewine
#bookishfeatures #bookfeature #booklover #bookstagram #readinglist #bookrecommendations #bookgram #bibliophile #mybookfeatures #bookstaexplore #booksofinstagram #literarymagazine #bookaholic #booksbooksbooks #bookgifts #bookishgifts #writersofinstagram #seasonsreadings #bookworm #englishliterature #bookstagrammer #bookaddict #bookcommunity #booktrust #childrenreading #winbooks #prizedraw #lovereading
’August 23 1946
My dear Michael,
Did you notice when you went into the garden yesterday morning that the rambler roses had been pruned? You would probably see the pink petals scattered on the lawn. It is a very prickly and entangling sort of job, like wrestling with a dragon. Mummy and I got plenty of scratches whilst doing it.
Love from Daddy’
.
From early 1945 to the late 1947, a sequence of 150 illustrated letters were sent to Michael Phillipson in which his father Charles captures the delight to be found in the mundane detail of everyday life, seen through the lens of his own quirky imagination.
Passengers on the morning train hidden behind their newspapers; the fun to be had on a revolving office chair; a walk on a very windy day; carrying home a Christmas tree . . . Jotted on a sheet torn from a pad of office paper, and often sketched in haste in tea or lunch breaks, each letter was embellished with a hand-drawn stamp which made the young Michael feel as if he was receiving ‘real’ letters. And real letters they are – love-letters, even – for through their affectionate words, mischievous drawings and gentle encouragement of Michael’s own literary and artistic explorations, a father’s love for his son shines out.
Now these letters have been gathered together in a handsome cloth-bound hardback edition. Letters to Michael presents a touching portrait of the relationship between a father and his son and captures a bygone age when people still wrote letters using pen and paper. Altogether, this charming book is an antidote to troubled times and would make a perfect present. Link in bio.
From £20 inc. p&p | Worldwide shipping
🌾Down to Earth: A Farming Revival | The Slightly Foxed Podcast Episode 49🌾
Sarah Langford, author of Rooted: How Regenerative Farming Can Change the World, joins the Slightly Foxed Editors and presenter Rosie Goldsmith round the kitchen table to tell us how and why she gave up her career as a criminal barrister to become a farmer, and about the woman who was her inspiration: Eve Balfour, the extraordinary aristocrat, founder of the Soil Association and author of The Living Soil.
Farming was in Sarah’s family. So when her own family’s circumstances changed and her husband was looking for a new direction, they said goodbye to the city and moved with their two young children to Suffolk, where they found themselves taking on the running of her father-in-law’s small arable farm. It was a steep learning curve and Sarah soon realized that the farming landscape had changed dramatically from the one she remembered: ‘My grandfather Peter was a hero who fed a starving nation. Now his son Charlie, my uncle, is considered a villain, blamed for ecological catastrophe and with a legacy no one wants.’
Needing to learn more, she describes how she travelled the country, hearing moving and inspiring human stories from small farmers who are farming in a new – but completely traditional – way, working to put more into the land than they are taking out of it, relying on natural processes like crop rotation and grazing animals rather than using chemicals to give life to the soil. This is regenerative farming – a hard row to hoe but with huge potential benefits for the planet as well as for us and other species. Sarah and her husband are now practising it on their own farm.
Our new podcast is now live on all platforms. Click on the link below to listen to it on our website!🦊🎧️📚️
foxedquarterly.com/down-to-earth-a-farming-revival-slightly-foxed-podcast-episode-49/
