Et cetera | Slightly Foxed

Subscribe / Gift Subscriptions

Subscribe / Gift Subscriptions

- Search for:
0
0

What excellent company you are!

I have been devoted to your podcast for over a year; it could be improved only by being more frequent. Every book I have ordered from you has been a delight; nothing disappoints. I receive your emails with pleasure, and that’s saying a lot. Slightly Foxed is a source of content . . .

K. Nichols, Washington, USA

Popular categories

Explore our library

‘Please write and tell me about London . . . ’ | Helene Hanff, 84, Charing Cross Road | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

‘Please write and tell me about London . . . ’ | Helene Hanff, 84, Charing Cross Road | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

‘Please write and tell me about London, I live for the day when I step off the boat-train and feel its dirty sidewalks under my feet. I want to walk up Berkeley Square and down Wimpole Street and stand in…

A Lost Rural World | The Brensham Trilogy by John Moore | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

A Lost Rural World | The Brensham Trilogy by John Moore | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

‘I first encountered Brensham during an arduous recovery from illness. A lifelong walker and seeker-out of hidden places, I was unable to wander much more than ten minutes from home, but to read John Moore was to be transported instantly…

The Descriptive Powers of Laurie Lee | As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

The Descriptive Powers of Laurie Lee | As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

‘For anyone who has read Cider with Rosie, Lee’s descriptive powers require little introduction . . . ’ – Justin Marozzi on the writing of Laurie Lee

Editorial Submissions

Slightly Foxed articles are generally between 1,000 and 2,000 words in length, depending on the significance of the subject • We always pay our contributors for published articles but we are unable to pay a fee for anything sent in as an unsolicited article if we turn it down ...

From the editors

Wellbeing and Wonder | A Countryman’s Summer Notebook | Adrian Bell July Offer

Wellbeing and Wonder | A Countryman’s Summer Notebook | Adrian Bell July Offer

‘There were wild strawberries under my hand where I sat: a butterfly on a grass stem gave me an illusion of a sky blue flower. Horses were visible standing head to tail in a pasture. It was their day of…

‘Everyone has to start somewhere . . . ’ | Eric Newby, Something Wholesale | From the Slightly Foxed Bookshelves

‘Everyone has to start somewhere . . . ’ | Eric Newby, Something Wholesale | From the Slightly Foxed Bookshelves

‘It remains one of the more surprising facts of life that the intrepid traveller Eric Newby, who by the time I knew him had the weatherbeaten cragginess of a man only happy when halfway up the Hindu Kush, should have…

‘I suppose that all small boys look at their fathers in order to learn what makes a man a man.’

‘I suppose that all small boys look at their fathers in order to learn what makes a man a man.’

‘I suppose that all small boys look at their fathers in order to learn what makes a man a man. There must be as many answers as there are men.’ – Robert Westall, The Making of Me Greetings from Hoxton Square…

The Oxford Years | James Lees-Milne, Another Self | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

The Oxford Years | James Lees-Milne, Another Self | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

‘The single choice between Oxford or Cambridge was as imperative as that between a man’s shoe- and gunmaker. The shoes came either from Lobb or Peel, the guns from Purdey or Holland and Holland. There was no other way of…

The Oily Wizard | Extract from The Making of Me

The Oily Wizard | Extract from The Making of Me

I suppose that all small boys look at their fathers in order to learn what makes a man a man. There must be as many answers as there are men. Certainly I’m glad my father didn’t display his manhood by driving large cars too fast, drinking large whiskies too fast, fertilizing a lot of strange women or killing a large number of birds or animals with a smoking shotgun.

The Oxford Years | Extract from Another Self

The Oxford Years | Extract from Another Self

Having completed the stenography and typewriting course with adequate credits I was again at a loose end. Not for the last time the question arose, what was I to do? Alas, no £5,000 a year directorship offered itself. My father was aghast. My mother, whose faith in me however severely tested remained unshakeable, was not quite so disappointed.

‘A Summer of Splendid Reading’ | New this Summer from Slightly Foxed

‘A Summer of Splendid Reading’ | New this Summer from Slightly Foxed

‘I am thrilled with my subscription to Slightly Foxed. It’s fantastic: affectionate and beautifully written reviews of great books previously unknown to me. I look forward to a summer of splendid reading.’ – C. Crisford, UK Greetings from Hoxton Square, where…

Riding the Tiger

Riding the Tiger

While the 1979 Earls Court Motorcycle Show didn’t make much of a mark on exhibition history, big-bike fans who were there might remember going weak at the knees when Kawasaki pulled the wraps off a giant, six-cylinder behemoth called the Z1300 – then the largest-engined machine on the market.

SF magazine subscribers only

Miss Bracegirdle and Others

Miss Bracegirdle and Others

Researching a book about cricket, I came across Stacy Aumonier’s ‘The Match’, a short story written in 1916, recalling a game played at the height of summer two years previously, just before the Great War was declared. The devastating contrast between ‘the clean sanity of that sunlit field’ and the battleground that followed is a familiar literary idea, but Aumonier was one of the first to employ it. He looks back with disbelief at the innocence and generosity of spirit with which the game was played, the ‘good luck’s’ and the ‘well played’s’, the kindness and the cheerfulness of all those involved, the lunch, the drinks and the farewells, and can’t believe that so many of the players have since died. It’s a loving, elegiac and painful tale.

SF magazine subscribers only

A Late Discovery

A Late Discovery

Reading Giles Tremlett’s España: A Brief History of Spain, I pricked up my ears when he declared that Leopoldo Alas’s La Regenta was ‘rated by some as second only to Don Quixote in the Spanish canon’. I knew neither the novel nor the author, but I discovered that it had indeed come late to the English-speaking world, the first translation appearing a century after its original publication in Spanish in 1884–5.

SF magazine subscribers only

Roman Voices

Roman Voices

In a seafront café, waiting for the boat to Piraeus, I saw a book nestling in a cardboard box of discarded holiday thrillers: The Ides of March (1948) by Thornton Wilder, a 1960s Penguin Modern Classic. Scuffed and grey, it beckoned with the modest allure of a vestal virgin in a troupe of painted harlots. An epistolary novel about Julius Caesar in the last year of his life – how could I never have heard of it? I paid one euro and hurried on to the boat with my prize. Wilder was a gregarious loner who loved nothing so much as a ship’s deck ‘amid the careening smoke stacks and the flying spray’ – it was the perfect place for us to meet.

SF magazine subscribers only

Catching the White Whale

Catching the White Whale

There are a few books that are fixed in the popular imagination as much by their illustrations as by the text. Winnie-the-Pooh springs to mind as a prime example of such a collaboration between author and illustrator. E. H. Shepard’s pictures of the bear and the piglet are seen everywhere, especially on social media memes peddling folksy platitudes, completely divorced from A. A. Milne’s words yet instantly recognizable. Shepard is also responsible for the original and iconic images of the characters from The Wind in the Willows, while you can barely think of Roald Dahl’s books without envisioning Quentin Blake’s BFG.

SF magazine subscribers only