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A World of Reading

The independent-minded quarterly 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 a well-read friend than a literary magazine.

‘Slightly Foxed is a perfect readers’ periodical and every issue is a joy. In its pages, books you don’t yet know come to light and books you already love come to life.’ Adam Foulds


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20190515100612 Foxed Pod: Episode 7

Episode 7: A Window on the World

The Slightly Foxed Podcast

Gail, Steph and Anna go behind the scenes with booksellers Brett Wolstencroft of Daunt Books and Kathleen Smith of Topping & Co. Bath to talk about the reality and romance of life running two of the country’s finest bookshops. Andrew Hawkins recounts the tale of a London publisher who tried his hand at repping and ended up in a spot of bother with a drunken poet in Fife, and there’s the usual round-up of recommended reading and news from Hoxton Square.
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Up There on a Visit

Mike Petty on visiting a poet

It was the custom then, in the late ’70s, and still is for all I know, for editors to saunter forth from their ivory towers and visit bookshops with the reps, experience life at the sharp end of the book trade and so on. It was called being ‘on the road’ but tended to concentrate on large centres of population easily reached from London. Nothing could disguise the jittery bonhomie of the unfortunate rep chosen for this honour, or the loathing in the eyes of the bookseller forced to undergo ordeal by young puppy on top of the usual ordeal by rep.
20190510151647 Not Swinging, Just Dancing | From the Slightly Foxed Archives | Linda Leatherbarrow on Edna O’Brien

From the Slightly Foxed archives || Not Swinging, Just Dancing

As regular readers know, each issue of the magazine itself ranges far and wide across all sorts of books and subjects – from non-fiction, fiction, poetry, biography, memoir, guides and even, once, a manual for operating a British Seagull Co. outboard motor but as our newsletters have been rather more non-fiction focused of late, we thought it was high time we shared a recommendation for fiction. So, in this selected article from the archives, we’re dancing back to Issue 35 (Autumn 2012) with Linda Leatherbarrow on the novels of Edna O’Brien.
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O’Brian’s World

Grant McIntyre on Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin novels

O’Brian’s mastery of language is most wonderful of all. He manages to capture that mixture of toughness and grace which, for me at least, makes formal eighteenth-century English so attractive. Also the verbal violence that makes demotic eighteenth-century English so vivid. He catches Stephen’s subtle Irishness, or the slightly unidiomatic English of highly educated South Americans, or the competitiveness of children, or the way one wife can make her opinion of another very clear without expressing it, or Jack can make his authority absolute without disrespect – and he does it all in the language of the time.