Enter A Fox

Simon Gray

How much can go wrong in a day? How much can go wrong in a life? In this chronicle of a year of things going wrong (and just occasionally right), the author of the acclaimed The Smoking Diaries meets with triumph and disaster and treats those two impostors just the same – which is to say with the mixture of wit, anger, vexation and candour that has made Simon Gray one of Britain’s greatest writers of comedy – including the comedy that lurks in tragedy.

In The Smoking Diaries and its successors, he discovered what felt like a new prose form, pitched halfway between diary and memoir, with the immediacy of the former yet the structure and longer reflectiveness of the latter. It was also the perfect vehicle for his voice, which would recount defiant and glittering night thoughts in a wry, half-defeated, urbane, endlessly funny manner

Tony Gould, Observer

Laconic, never forced, and wonderfully self-deprecating, Gray rarely disappoints

Good Books Guide

Gray was made a CBE in the New Years Honours. For these diaries alone he should be knighted

Daily Express

The Author

Simon Gray was born in 1936. He began his writing career with Colmain, the first of five novels published by Faber. He is the author of many plays for TV and radio and films, including After Pilkington, which won the Prix Italia, and the Emmy Award-winning Unnatural Pursuits. He wrote more than thirty stage plays, among them Butley and Otherwise Engaged, which both received Evening Standard Awards for Best Play, and The Late Middle Classes, winner of the Barclay’s Best Play Award. His plays Little Nell and Missing Dates were both broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and The Last Cigarette, which he adapted with Hugh Whitemore from The Smoking Diaries, premiered in March 2009. In 1991 he was the BAFTA Writer of the Year. His acclaimed works of non-fiction include An Unnatural Pursuit, How’s That for Telling ‘Em, Fat Lady? and, published by Granta, Fat Chance, Enter a Fox, The Smoking Diaries, The Year of the Jouncer and The Last Cigarette. He was appointed CBE in the 2005 New Year’s Honours for his services to drama and literature. Simon Gray died in August 2008.