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A Whole World of Good Reading

The independent-minded quarterly magazine that combines good looks, good writing and a personal approach. Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal. Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it’s more like having a well-read friend than a literary review subscription.

Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly Magazine Spring 2023

The Magazine

Each issue of Slightly Foxed  magazine offers 96 pages of lively personal recommendations for books of lasting interest – books, including fiction and non-fiction, that have stood the test of time and have left their mark on the people who write about them. It’s an eclectic mix, and our contributors are an eclectic bunch too – some well-known, others not so, but all passionate about sharing their enthusiasm for a book or author. In recent and forthcoming issues:

Adam Foulds opens The Book of DisquietSelina Hastings visits Don Otavio with Sybille Bedford • Flora Watkins acts as a go-between for L. P. Hartley • Olivia Potts and Julia Child master the art of French cooking • Justin Marozzi takes a short walk in the Hindu Kush • Adam Sisman faces a Martian invasion with H. G. Wells • Colin Clark introduces Derek Parker to Marilyn Monroe • Daisy Dunn and Mary Renault drink The Last of the WinePosy Fallowfield attends a wedding with Carson McCullers • Gustav Temple is unnerved by Patricia Highsmith • Margaret Drabble spends time with Doris Lessing, and much more besides . . .

Books

Slightly Foxed brings back forgotten voices through its Slightly Foxed Editions, a series of beautifully produced little hand-numbered pocket hardback reissues of classic memoirs, all of them absorbing and irresistibly collectable. The series includes memoirs by Edward Ardizzone, Roald Dahl, Gerald Durrell, Ysenda Maxtone Graham, Graham Greene, Helene Hanff, Laurie Lee, James Lees-Milne, Hilary Mantel, Gavin Maxwell, Jessica Mitford, Eric Newby, V. S. Pritchett, Gwen Raverat, Dodie Smith and Rosemary Sutcliff, among others. Once the initial run of 2,000 copies of each title has sold out, the most popular of the SF Editions are then reissued as unnumbered (but still collectable) Plain Foxed Editions bound in a handsome duck-egg blue cloth.

For younger bookworms – and nostalgic older ones too – there’s the Slightly Foxed Cubs series, in which we’ve so far reissued Ronald Welch’s outstanding – and long unavailable – historical novels, BB’s classic nature adventure stories for children and Rosemary Sutcliff’s well-loved Roman and post-Roman novels, in a handsome format with the original illustrations.

  • Slightly Foxed Editions

    Slightly Foxed Editions

    Slightly Foxed Editions is a series of beautifully produced little pocket hardback reissues of classic memoirs, all of them highly absorbing and irresistibly collectable.

    The series includes memoirs by Edward Ardizzone, Roald Dahl, Gerald Durrell, Graham Greene, Helene Hanff, Laurie Lee, Hilary Mantel, Jessica Mitford, Eric Newby, V. S. Pritchett, Gwen Raverat, Dodie Smith and Rosemary Sutcliff, among others.

  • Slightly Foxed Cubs

    Slightly Foxed Cubs

    For younger bookworms – and nostalgic older ones too – there’s the Slightly Foxed Cubs series, in which we’ve reissued Rosemary Sutcliff’s Roman novels, favourite titles by BB and a number of Ronald Welch’s outstanding series of historical novels, in a handsome format with the original illustrations.

  • Plain Foxed Editions

    Plain Foxed Editions

    Many of the most popular titles in our limited Slightly Foxed Editions series of classic memoirs have sold out, but we are now making a number of them available in a plainer, unnumbered hardback edition. These sturdy little books, bound in duck-egg blue cloth, come in the same neat pocket format as the original SFEs and will happily fill any gaps on your shelves, as well as forming a delightful uniform edition on their own.

  • The Readers’ Catalogue

    The Readers’ Catalogue

    In addition to listing all the books we publish here at Slightly Foxed, the quarterly printed Readers’ Catalogue (which goes out to subscribers with each new issue of the quarterly) contains our pick of the best newly-published or recently-reissued titles from other publishers.

  • Seasonal & Special Releases

    Seasonal & Special Releases

    In addition to our range of memoirs, biographies and children’s books we have produced a few other seasonal books and other special releases over the years.

  • Goods

    Goods

    Whether you’re in search of a present for a bookish friend or relative, or a treat for yourself, Slightly Foxed offers a carefully chosen range of book-related merchandise, including notebooks, sturdy and good-looking book bags, cards, and bookplates.

Et cetera

Welcome to our virtual kitchen table. Here you can read articles and extracts from the quarterly magazine and our books, catch up with newsletters, find out more about our writers and artists, use the online index to hunt down articles published in back issues and seek out books featured in the magazine, listen to episodes of our podcast, and much more besides.

  • Katherine Rundell and Osman Yousefzada win The Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2022
    15 March 2023

    Katherine Rundell and Osman Yousefzada win The Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2022

    Slightly Foxed and The Biographers’ Club are delighted to announce that the joint winners of the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2022, chosen by judges Alan Samson, Lucy Scholes and Anne Sebba, are Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell and The Go-Between: A Portrait of Growing Up Between Different Worlds by Osman Yousefzada.
  • ‘She was a most remarkable woman . . .’ | Slightly Foxed gift ideas
    10 March 2023

    ‘She was a most remarkable woman . . .’ | Slightly Foxed gift ideas

    As Mothering Sunday approaches in the UK and Ireland (those of you in the rest of the world have a little more time!), we thought some of you may appreciate a few bookish gift ideas for the ‘most remarkable’ women in your lives, be they mother or grandmother figures – or any fellow booklover or, indeed, yourself! All items can be wrapped in handsome brown paper, tied up with our cream ribbon and sent directly to recipient, or to you to hand over in person. If you’re worried about delivery times, or if you’re cutting it a little fine when placing your order, you can choose to have an instant gift card sent to you by email or directly to the recipient.
  • True to Both My Selves | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves
    17 February 2023

    True to Both My Selves | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

    Introducing the latest addition to the Slightly Foxed Editions list, No. 62: True to Both My Selves By the time she was 14 Katrin FitzHerbert had lived in nearly thirty different places and attended fourteen schools – an unusual childhood, and the more so because it gave her two separate identities, one formed in the Germany of the Third Reich, the other in England after the Second World War. In True to Both My Selves, winner of the 1998 J. R. Ackerley Prize for autobiography, Katrin FitzHerbert tells the gripping story of her family, beginning with the marriage of her German expatriate grandfather and English grandmother, in London in 1905. Their fate was decided by an ugly and little-known chapter in British history, the ill-treatment of the quiet, law-abiding German minority in Britain during the First World War. Expelled by the British Government in 1919 and with their 8-year-old daughter Elfreda in tow, the couple finally and thankfully left to make a new life in a small German town near Berlin. By 1931 Elfreda had fallen in love and married the German man who in 1936 would become the author’s father, a committed member of the Nazi Party employed in the Hitler Youth administration, whom Katrin idolized. In True to Both My Selves she gives a fascinating inside account of what it was like to grow up in a National Socialist state . . .
  • Adrian Bell | A Countryman’s Spring Notebook
    20 January 2023

    Adrian Bell | A Countryman’s Spring Notebook

    We’re delighted to bring you news of a Slightly Foxed special release: Adrian Bell, A Countryman’s Spring Notebook Another treat for lovers of Adrian Bell to put alongside A Countryman’s Winter Notebook, which we published in 2021. A Countryman’s Spring Notebook is our second seasonal selection from the weekly column Bell wrote from 1950 to 1980 for the Eastern Daily Press and catches beautifully the arrival of Spring in the East Anglian landscape he loved and knew so well. Each essay is a little masterpiece, a fleeting moment captured with a painterly eye and the down-to-earth observation of the farmer Bell became after he left his fashionable life in Chelsea shortly after the First World War – an experience which produced his much-loved farming trilogy, Corduroy, Silver Ley and The Cherry Tree.

The Slightly Foxed Podcast

Come behind the scenes with the staff of Slightly Foxed to learn what makes this unusual literary magazine tick, meet some of its varied friends and contributors, and hear their personal recommendations for favourite and often forgotten books that have helped, haunted, informed or entertained them.

From Readers & The Press

  • ‘It is a beautiful place to be transported to’
    16 May 2022

    ‘It is a beautiful place to be transported to’

    ‘Flora is “Laura” in the retelling and with a keen eye for observing nature and beauty, Flora Thompson renders an exacting yet not too sentimental picture of what life was like for the rural poor. Struggling to make ends meet, yet happy in enjoying the simple pleasures of life, Lark Rise is an intimate and detailed social history of life in those times . . . It is a beautiful place to be transported to and though the last page of the book brought tears to my eyes, I will leave it to you, to find out why.’ 
  • ‘Anne Fadiman’s mastery of the English language is a delight . . .’
    28 January 2022

    ‘Anne Fadiman’s mastery of the English language is a delight . . .’

    ‘I received The Wine Lover’s Daughter in the post, and within two days I had read it from cover to cover. All I can say is that it was a delightful book. Anne Fadiman’s mastery of the English language is…
  • ‘An exquisite book, Letters to Michael, published by Slightly Foxed’
    17 December 2021

    ‘An exquisite book, Letters to Michael, published by Slightly Foxed’

    Between early 1945 and autumn 1947, Charles Phillipson, an illustrator in the publicity department of an electrical company, wrote 150 letters to his young son, Michael – amusing drawings of daily life accompanied by a few cheerful words . . . they have been gathered into an exquisite book, Letters to Michael, published by Slightly Foxed.
  • ‘Two rich recent discoveries – both published by Slightly Foxed Editions’
    4 October 2021

    ‘Two rich recent discoveries – both published by Slightly Foxed Editions’

    The Empress of Ireland is the novelist and screenwriter Christopher Robbins’s account of his friendship with the most successful forgotten Irish film director of all time, Brian Desmond Hurst . . . The book, simply, is a masterpiece, and its neglect is as inexplicable as that of its subject. Still Life by Richard Cobb, first published in 1983, is a memoir of a Tunbridge Wells childhood. Cobb, historian and Francophile, seems to have had a photographic memory, and his memoir is both an uncannily vivid resurrection of past times . . .

‘Thank you SF for all the pleasure you give . . .

. . . and if we ARE headed for Hell in a handcart, I hope it will be well-stocked with past issues of your life-enhancing magazine.’
S. Boswell, Suffolk

Birth of a Book

‘Slightly Foxed have stepped aside from the ebook stampede to publish beautifully bound hardbacks that recall a bygone age — and sell like hot cakes. Watch Smith Settle bookbinders near Leeds bring one of their hardback books to life. Mesmerising.’

Film shot by Glen Milner for The Telegraph.

Birth of a Book
Birth of a Book
Slightly Foxed Subscription Renewal

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We’re hard at work on upcoming issues which will be full of the usual entertaining writing and excellent recommendations for good reading. We do hope you’ll consider renewing and joining the SF club for another year – or two, or three! You can do so online by clicking the button below or by telephoning the office on +44 (0)20 7033 0258

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