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Food without Shame | From the Slightly Foxed archives

Food without Shame | From the Slightly Foxed archives

‘Food is life, and Laurie Colwin served hers up with jokes and trivia, delightful diversions and strange segues . . .’ Greetings from Hoxton Square, where we’re busy preparing a feast of good reading for the summer quarter: the new issue of Slightly Foxed magazine will be rolling off the presses next week, as well as the latest limited-edition memoir, Over to Candleford & Candleford Green by Flora Thompson. To fortify readers meantime, we have selected a delicious morsel from the archives to share with you this weekend. We were delighted to learn that Olivia Potts was shortlisted for the Fortum & Mason Food and Drink Awards 2022 for her food writing in Slightly Foxed, so we’re serving up her piece on Laurie Colwin, the original ‘writer in the kitchen’.
16th May 2022

Join the Slightly Foxed team | Jobs & Internships

Slightly Foxed is looking for a friendly, enthusiastic person to join their London office for a 3-month paid publishing internship. We need a lively, well-organized person who enjoys customer service and sales. You will be primarily communicating with customers, preparing and dispatching orders, gift-wrapping and hand-writing gift cards and messages and be helping with general day to day administrative and marketing tasks in the office. You will be included in our monthly meetings and will be encouraged to take an interest in all aspects of the production of a magazine and books. Slightly Foxed prides itself on its personal, friendly and high-end service, which is something that our readers love so, in this role, you’ll be a very important part of the team.
From the editors
16th 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.’ 
- Bag Full of Books
From readers
Another Self | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

Another Self | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

James Lees-Milne wrote that he ‘always felt an outsider in every circle’. It was this, combined with his eye for detail and highly developed sense of the ridiculous, that made him such a wonderful comic writer. John Betjeman compared the impact of Another Self to that of Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall. We’re delighted to announce that this classic memoir will be available to readers once more, published on 1 June in a Plain Foxed Edition. These sturdy little books, bound in duck-egg blue cloth, come in the same neat pocket format as the original Slightly Foxed Editions. Please do go forth and place your order now.
Z is for Zola, Émile | From the Slightly Foxed archives

Z is for Zola, Émile | From the Slightly Foxed archives

Greetings from Hoxton Square, where we can scarcely believe we’ve come to the end of our alphabetical adventures through the Slightly Foxed archives, arriving at Andrew Wall’s piece on The Ladies’ Paradise by Émile Zola. We do hope you’ll enjoy it. It’s been a joy to delve into back issues and revisit old favourites, from Margery Allingham’s crime fiction to consumer culture with Émile Zola, via Barbara Comyns, Graham Greene, Molly Keane, Marilynne Robinson, Kurt Vonnegut and many more along the way. And we have barely burrowed into the archive of hidden gems: eighteen years’ worth of entertaining and original reading recommendations, good humour and good writing.
A Boy at the Hogarth Press | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

A Boy at the Hogarth Press | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

There have been many memoirs of life among the Bloomsberries, but none more wickedly frank or funny than Richard Kennedy’s A Boy at the Hogarth Press. In 1926, at the age of 16, Richard Kennedy left school without a single qualification and went to work at Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press. Though home from home for London’s intellectual élite, the Press’s damp basement at Tavistock Square was anything but elegant, with the legendarily mean LW keeping a close check on everything, including the toilet paper, and frequently exploding when confronted with RK’s latest idiocy. The Woolfs clearly developed a fondness for their apprentice, but when he left several years later LW pronounced him ‘the most frightful idiot he [had] ever had the privilege of meeting in a long career of suffering fools’.

Another Self | Chapter I: Tobias and the Angel

My world was the only real world. Nothing about it seemed incongruous; and those events which happened in it were never inconsequential. Its relation with the great outside world was tenuous. By which I do not deny that a few of my notable fancies were sparked off by momentous contacts with the unreal, outside world. For of course they often were. A riveting story or a glamorous present might do the trick, and set the magic working. On the other hand the pattern of events in my world was often outrageously disturbed by trivial demands made by the unreal world, such as to eat tapioca pudding, to wash my teeth, or to go to bed when I felt disinclined.
Episode 41: Barbara Pym and Other Excellent Women

Episode 41: Barbara Pym and Other Excellent Women

Paula Byrne, author of The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym, and Lucy Scholes, critic, Paris Review columnist and editor at McNally Editions, join the Slightly Foxed team to plumb the depths and scale the peaks of Barbara Pym’s writing, life and loves. From Nazi Germany to the African Institute; from London’s bedsit land to parish halls; from unrequited love affairs with unsuitable men to an epistolary friendship with Philip Larkin; and from rejection by Jonathan Cape to overnight success via the TLS, we trace Pym’s life through her novels, visiting the Bodleian and Boots lending libraries along the way. There’s joy in Some Tame Gazelle, loneliness in Quartet in Autumn, and humour and all human experience in between, with excellent women consistently her theme.
57 minutes

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