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20181119000000 Anna Trench Illustration, Slightly Foxed Subscribers' Writing Competition

Subscribers’ Writing Competition 2019

From the start, we were keen that Slightly Foxed should feature not only contributors familiar from other book pages but also the voices of people who could write but who didn’t think of themselves as writers – people outside the literary world, who had other equally interesting kinds of experience, and for whom the written word was just as important … We’re looking for a piece of between 1,000 and 1,500 words on a favourite book or on a personal experience that is ‘book-related’ …
20190301114851 Laura Freeman on Nancy Mitford's Parisian Novels, Slightly Foxed Issue 61

The Paris Effect

Laura Freeman on Nancy Mitford’s Parisian novels

Brimming. That was how I spent my first weeks in Paris. Brimming with tears at the smallest setback. For Nancy Mitford’s Northey in Don’t Tell Alfred, dispatched to Paris to be secretary to Fanny Wincham, the new Madame l’Ambassadrice at the British Embassy, it is the ‘cruel food’ of France that sets her off. Beef consommé. Brimming. Lobster. Brimming. Foie gras. Brimming. ‘A Frenchman on board told me what they do to sweet geese for pâté de foie gras,’ says Northey at dinner on her first night at the Ambassador’s Residence. ‘Very wrong and stupid of him,’ says Fanny.
20190304104922 New this Spring from Slightly Foxed

New this Spring from Slightly Foxed

We’re delighted to report that the Spring issue of Slightly Foxed (No. 61) has left the printing press at Smith Settle. It ranges far and wide in the usual eclectic manner, and we do hope it will provide plenty of recommendations for reading off the beaten track. With it, as usual, you’ll find a copy of our latest Readers’ Catalogue, detailing new books, our backlist, books featured in the latest issue of the quarterly, recommended reading and other offers and bundles . . .
20190301132405 Rowena Macdonald on Philip Hensher, Kitchen Venom - Slightly Foxed Issue 61

Commons People

Rowena Macdonald on Philip Hensher, Kitchen Venom

When I first started working at the House of Commons, back in 2001, Philip Hensher was still discussed in dark tones by my colleagues. He was the only employee in living memory to have been sacked. Five years before, he had written Kitchen Venom, a novel set in the Clerks’ Department where we worked, about John, a secretly gay, hunchbacked senior clerk who spends his workday afternoons sneaking off to see a beautiful Italian rent boy in Earls Court.
20090301112741 That unsettling misunderstanding over the eggs. A Late Beginner

‘Tombs, dear. Where’s your other sock?’

Extract from A Late Beginner, Priscilla Napier

No one told me that the pyramids had been one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, but they were certainly the primal wonder of mine. From early on they exercised an oddly persistent fascination.They could not, it seemed, be taken for granted, like hills and trees and houses. Approached along the pyramid road they got larger and larger and larger until they filled up one half of the sky. It took a long while to ride lurchingly round the Great Pyramid on a camel, and from no angle could their stupendousness be made a thing of nought. They were made of square yellow blocks, exactly like sugar lumps, but higher than I was.

20090601110654 Daniel Macklin - Christopher Robbins, Finnegans Wake, Slightly Foxed Issue 22

Sound Nonsense

Christopher Robbins on James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

The words rolled out, natural and clear, and I listened with new ears and understanding. Enlightenment had finally come. Passages spoken aloud in an Irish accent, by someone who loved the prose enough to commit long passages to memory, released the book’s power. Its beauty had been unlocked not by a literary intellectual, but by a half-tight man in a cheap suit standing at the bar of a Dublin pub. Finnegans Wake was revealed as a work of sound rather than sense, a form of high falutin, Gaelic, literary rap. Ireland talking in her sleep. It was as if Brian had taken me by the elbow, and guided me into this particular tavern to receive a final, Celtic benediction.
20190213175415 Jan Morris, Conundrum - Derek Johns review in Slightly Foxed Issue 61

A Leap into the Light

Derek Johns on Jan Morris, Conundrum

I first met Jan Morris in the offices of the publisher Random House in New York in the early 1980s. I was a junior editor there, and was invited to meet someone I considered to be one of the most intriguing writers I had read. This was nothing more than a handshake and an acknowledgement of our shared Britishness in New York. But I was immediately struck by Jan’s warmth and affability, qualities that are key to her genius for talking to people and drawing stories from them. (For while Jan is less of an extrovert in person than in her writings, and indeed in some ways is quite reserved, she nonetheless possesses a remarkable ability, surely learned in the world of journalism, to nose out a story.)

20070901120702 Underwear Was Important - Hazel Wood, Posy Simmonds - Slightly Foxed Issue 15

Underwear Was Important

Hazel Wood on Posy Simmonds

Posy’s dialogue is as good as her draughtsmanship, and she has a talent for names (an area in which so many writers fall down) which is as good as that of Evelyn Waugh or Anthony Powell. What enchants and convinces in all her work is the brilliantly observed detail. If Posy draws a French coffee pot it is a completely authentic French coffee pot. The appearance of her characters – toddlers, sulky teenagers, pushy mothers, angst-ridden authors, pretentious publishing types – is always spot on. This kind of texture, she says, is the equivalent of verbal description in a novel . . .
20081201120422

The Temptation of Mrs Harris

Maggie Fergusson on Paul Gallico, Flowers for Mrs Harris

It was astonishing to me that a grown-up could cry, and more than astonishing that anyone should cry for joy. The memory came back to me a few weeks ago, as I reread, with my 9-year-old daughter, Paul Gallico’s Flowers for Mrs Harris. For Gallico, most fondly remembered as the author of The Snow Goose, was a master of the bittersweet, of the mysterious kinship between suffering and joy. He knew how to fold together humour and poignant detail in just the right proportions to prevent his prose from curdling into mawkishness and sentimentality.
20190301174119 Rudyard Kipling - Alastair Glegg, Reading in Prep School, Slightly Foxed Issue 60

Unsung Heroes

Alastair Glegg on learning to read at prep school

The library at Fonthill Preparatory School was just what I imagined a Gentlemen’s Club to be like: shiny brown leather armchairs with velvet cushions, long oak tables, panelled walls, a coal fire in the corner, and windows looking on to the branches of an enormous beech tree. And, of course, books. It was there that I came to know the schoolboy classics of the time: the adventures of Biggles, the misadventures of William, and the voyages of the Swallows and the Amazons.
20190208174359 Slightly Foxed February News - From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves: Country Boy

From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves: Country Boy

We’re down to our last binders’ parcel of Slightly Foxed Edition No. 22, Country Boy. Richard Hillyer was the pseudonym used by Charles Stranks, a farmworker’s son who grew up in great poverty in a remote Buckinghamshire village in the years before the First World War. Hillyer describes how, against all the odds, he discovers a love of reading, manages to educate himself and get to university. Country Boy has been a firm favourite with readers over the years, and copies of our handsome edition have been steadily slipping off the shelves without fanfare. Now, as it nears the end of its time on the SF list, we thought we’d send if off in style with an extract . . .
20130301104513 Slightly Foxed Editions COUNTRY BOY, Richard Hillyer

Country Boy

Richard Hillyer

The coloured words flashed out and entranced my fancy. They drew pictures in the mind. Words became magical, incantations, abracadabra which called up spirits. My dormant imagination opened like a flower in the sun. Life at home was drab and colourless, with nothing to light up the dull monotony of the unchanging days. Here in books was a limitless world that I could have for my own. It was like coming up from the bottom of the ocean and seeing the universe for the first time . . .
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‘Two episodes in and I’m hooked . . . ’

W. Percy

‘Sick of bestsellers and celebrity authors? Escape into a civilized world of knowledgeable and witty bibliophiles. Two episodes in and I’m hooked. The host skillfully weaves the conversation round the kitchen table at this pocket-sized magazine as the Slightly Foxed team and their guests discuss lesser-known literary gems. I particularly enjoyed hearing from the formidable and entertaining Frances Wood, formerly of the British Library, about her time spent in Mao’s China. This is a real find.’


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‘The equivalent of a bookish chat with a good friend . . . ’

A. Parsons

‘Dear slightly foxes, I listen to a wide range of bookish podcasts and yours has gone straight to the top of my favourites list. My only mistake was listening to it in the car on my morning commute rather than settling down in a comfy armchair with a cup of tea. It honestly does feel like the equivalent of a bookish chat with a good friend.’


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‘It’s a terrific honour . . .’

Michèle Mendelssohn

‘I’m over the moon, pleased as punch and downright delighted that my book has been shortlisted. It’s a terrific honour.’


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‘Thank you to the judges and to the Biographers’ Club . . .’

Bart van Es

‘I’m hugely happy to be on the shortlist. Many of the previous winners are books I’m familiar with and love, so it’s exciting to be (sort of) in their company. I can only say “thank you!” to the judges and to the Biographers’ Club.’


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‘I am honoured and delighted . . . ’

Roland Philipps

‘I am honoured and delighted that A Spy Named Orphan has been chosen for the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2018, not least because of the brilliant, fascinating and varied company it keeps on the shortlist.’


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‘I’m delighted to be shortlisted . . . ’

Fiona Sampson

‘I’m delighted to be shortlisted by such a distinguished set of judges, and especially for the Biographers Club, who keep our genre thriving despite the pressures exerted by changes in literary fashion, publishing and bookselling.’


20181128130521 Slightly Foxed Literary Magazine Issue 60

‘What a delightful 60th issue of Slightly Foxed . . . ’

J. Isaacson, Dorset

‘What a delightful 60th issue of Slightly Foxed, especially the art work by Posy Simmonds. Enjoyable to see the dogs portrayed, Stanley looks to be a dog with attitude. I also enjoyed and can identify with fellow subscriber Janet Morgan’s views about Facebook. I should have liked to have attended the recent celebrations at the London Library Reading Room but at least this year I was able to come to the Readers’ Day which I enjoyed. Thank you for the hard work it must have been to organise. The venue was delightful too.’
20190109171828 Simon Brett Legends of the Grail

Legends of the Grail

Simon Brett

‘Some people are snooty about illustrating grown-up fiction, vapouring on about how their imaginations will generate all the images they need. The riposte to that is Dickens and Phiz, Surtees and Leech, Sherlock Holmes and Sidney Paget. In the past The Folio Society has added to this roll of honour with such achievements as Joan Hassall’s wood engravings for Jane Austen, Simon Brett’s for a gamut running from Keats and Shelley to Legends of the Grail, Charles Keeping’s drawings for the 16-volume Dickens, Edward Bawden’s linocuts for Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. Folio threw a lifeline to illustrators as work for advertisers and magazines began to dry up from the 1950s, and it continues to be the one firm regularly commissioning pictures for something other than children’s books.’
20190114114430 Slightly Foxed Jobs

Join the Slightly Foxed team

Slightly Foxed is looking for a friendly, enthusiastic person to join their London office on a full-time basis. The Administrator (Office & Subscriptions) will be responsible for processing subscriptions, packing orders, gift-wrapping, stock management and general day-to-day office administration among other things

We need a lively, well-organized person who enjoys communicating with customers. Slightly Foxed prides itself on its personal, friendly and high-end service so, in this role, you’ll be a very important part of the team.
20180101175503 Slightly Foxed The New Yorker Long-winded Lady

Manhattan Moments

Kristian Doyle on Maeve Brennan, The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker

In January 1954, a vignette appeared in the New Yorker’s ‘Talk of the Town’ section, introduced only vaguely as a missive from ‘a rather long-winded lady’. The piece – like all ‘Talk’ stories then, unsigned – was a lightly sardonic first-person account of a woman’s disastrous experience in a dress shop. It might not have been world-changing, but it did stand out from the usual ‘Talk’ pieces, which were often impersonal, mannered little things, written in the royal ‘we’. The Long-Winded Lady, though, idiosyncratic from the beginning, spoke only for herself. ‘Well, there you are,’ she signed off, ‘in case you’ve paid any attention.’
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‘What a delight . . . ’

P. Guest

‘What a delight and what a coincidence! The very day that your first podcast arrived on my tablet, I had a small operation on one of my eyes that for a brief period is preventing me from reading. Now I can savour the delights of Slightly Foxed with one of my eyes heavily bandaged. Sheer bliss as I rest up for a few days while I wait for my next print edition to arrive.’


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‘Gentle joy . . . ’

M. and R. Levy

‘My reason for writing is that today we listened to your new podcast as we drove to pick up our son from university. I listen to quite a few of these and they vary from fascinating to self-indulgent. What you have done is a very difficult thing to do and is hardly ever done as well as your podcast does it – to represent and bring to life in a new medium the experience you give your subscribers through the quarterly. The whole feeling of gentle joy we get from discovering new books and authors and being reminded of old favourites was there as was so much else we get from your quarterly and what it opens up. Thank you and keep them coming.’


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‘An intimate setting in which we were cherished, invited guests . . . ’

P. Watson-Farrar

‘Absolutely loved hearing both podcasts today, one after the other. May I say how much my enjoyment was enriched by the clear, fluent way all participants expressed themselves, and in such lovely mellow tones, managing to convey an intimate setting in which we, the listeners, were cherished, invited guests around a familiar and comfortable table. Warmest thoughts to you all.’


20181201132950

Christmas Holidays

Extract from Drawn from Memory, Ernest H. Shepard

We three children were looking forward to Mother’s birthday, which was December 18th. December was ‘our’ birthday month, Cyril’s on the 20th, mine on the 10th: but the 18th was by far the most important. With a view to deciding what was to be done, we gathered round the schoolroom table, each armed with a statement of his or her financial resources. My assets were contained in an old purse that I kept hidden in a corner of the writing desk. This I emptied on the table. The contents were: one silver sixpence, one silver threepenny bit, and an assortment of coppers – total one shilling and tenpence halfpenny. Cyril was not in a much stronger position, and it remained for Ethel to retrieve the situation, which, I have to admit, she did most nobly. Lucky enough to have a godmother who sent her postal orders she was able to produce nearly ten shillings. Most magnanimously, she suggested that we pool our resources and give Mother one really nice present rather than three inferior ones. Cyril and I volunteered to draw and paint a birthday card between us, and we left it to Ethel to decide on the nature of the present.
20100901121425 British Library The Oldest Paper in the World Slightly Foxed

The Oldest Paper in the World

Frances Wood on The Oldest Paper in the World

It is not surprising that having invented paper over 2,000 years ago, the Chinese found a wide variety of ways to use it. Though the seventeenth-century landscape artist and arbiter of taste, Wen Zhengheng, considered painted wallpaper vulgar, Li Yu (1611–80), owner of the Mustard Seed Garden, advocated brown rather than white wallpaper, and Chinese painted wallpaper depicting birds, flowers, garden architecture and butterflies became popular in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1794, the first British ambassador to China, Lord Macartney, even brought back a set painted with scenes of Chinese streets and workshops for his banker Mr Coutts which can still be seen in the bank’s boardroom.
20181203112217 A Country Doctor's Commonplace Book - Slightly Foxed

A Country Doctor’s Commonplace Book by Philip Rhys Evans is on its way to be this year’s novelty bestseller . . .

Vanessa Thorpe, Observer

‘After a long career as a Suffolk GP, Dr Philip Rhys Evans may well be astonished to find himself lined up as a surprise literary hit this winter. But a short book compiled by the now-retired doctor with his wife Christine detailing the funny, bizarre and poignant situations he has encountered over his many years in practice is now a novelty Christmas title attracting glowing reviews . . .’
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‘A super addition to the Slightly Foxed repertoire . . . ’

W. Edmond

‘What a super addition to The Slightly Foxed repertoire, very well done Foxes! I’m sure I’m not the only subscriber who feels that they are now even more part of the Troop, it felt very cosy to be in the The Slightly Foxed Earth, as it were! Looking forward to Episode 2.’


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‘This is completely different to other literary podcasts . . .’

Cambette

‘. . . It’s about good reads you’ve never heard of. I’ve now got a long list of fascinating books to buy after only two episodes and not a single “bestseller” among them! A new gem.’


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‘Unmissable! Inviting; stimulating . . . ’

Bibliophile Annie

‘Unmissable! Inviting; stimulating; a companionable encouragement to persevere in reading widely and well. The first episode has already added some newcomers to my “to read” list, and I’m very much looking forward to future instalments. You will, too. Novel!’


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‘Excellent voices, really interesting content . . . ’

S. Naidoo

‘Wonderful! I am in the middle of listening to the first one (using The Podcast App). Had to stop in order to tell you how thrilled I am. Excellent voices, really interesting content, this is just what I hoped for. Thank you so much and congratulations to the whole team.’


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‘Oh joy, now you are sitting around my kitchen table as well! A masterly development for Slightly Foxed and one that adds another layer of pleasure to your inspirational idea and beautifully produced journals.’

L. Tones


20130301144054

Neither a Borrower . . . ?

Oliver Pritchett on some more elementary do’s and don’ts of book etiquette

Every year the registrar of Public Lending Right issues a report on the authors whose books have been most often borrowed from libraries. You can be sure these days that Danielle Steel, Josephine Cox and James Patterson will be up there with the leaders, but it might be more interesting, I think, to discover the name of the author whose books we borrow most often from each other. We need more information about these delicate transactions between friends. I’d also like to know the title of the book which is most often borrowed and never returned, and I’d be disappointed to learn that it was something like A Sensible Guide to Home Plumbing or The Grouter’s Friend . . .

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‘I am transported every time I hear from you to that “Wonderful Land of Books” that lives within us. It is lovely to hear your voices and learn how it all began. You are a light in the darkness for us across the seas.’

C. Taft


20181019120009

‘I’m so glad you’ve created a subscription for the Editions . . .’

M. Warnement, United States

‘I can’t wait to get Slightly Foxed Editions 44 and 45. I reread Winnie the Pooh this year and saw the exhibition of Shepard’s drawings. I’m so glad you’ve created a subscription for the Editions, so that I can pay in advance and don’t have to think about it. They will just come, like the gifts they are, as they are published. These are my Christmas gifts to myself. Thank you, and your photos on your website and in your email are beautiful’.
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‘The podcast is yet something else from Slightly Foxed to enchant. Thank you so much for giving me such pleasure throughout the years.’

B. Hulm


20131201110622 Daisy Hay on Jane Eyre - Article in Slightly Foxed literary review magazine

Not So Plain Jane

Daisy Hay on Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre was the novel that opened my eyes to literature. It was the first classic I picked up that I couldn’t put down. I read it from cover to cover in one heady weekend when I was 13: I had a nightmare about Grace Poole on Saturday night, and a sulk on Sunday afternoon when my mother made me put it down to talk to some cousins who’d come for tea. By Sunday evening I was done and I knew, with a certainty I still remember vividly, that literature was my thing . . .
20170915103930 Erskine Childers

Well Done, Carruthers!

Jim Ring on Erskine Childers, Riddle of the Sands

In the depths of last winter the bathroom, if by no means warm, was the least glacial room in the house. Ever since the children were born it’s also been the only place in our North Norfolk home in which there is sufficient freedom from interruption to read. I was convalescing from Zadie Smith (On Beauty) and needed the literary equivalent of comfort food: of toad in the hole, cottage pie or dead man’s leg. The choice was Howard’s End, Brideshead Revisited or The Riddle of the Sands, all steadfast companions since I grew out of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. There was a rattle of rain on the bathroom window. It was an evening for Erskine Childers. I closed the door firmly on the children, drew the bath and settled down to read.
20181017104839 Claire Dalby

Nettlecombe: Garden in October

Claire Dalby

‘As the Second World War draws to a close, a group of six friends pool resources in order to rent a sizeable House in the Country – capital H, capital C. Their list of requirements is exacting. It has to be ‘one of those houses that’s been built bit by bit, for hundreds of years’. It has to have acres of land and dozens of outhouses. As it turns out, such a house does exist, a pretty, rambling but rather rundown Tudor manor house in deepest Kent. And so they move in . . .’
20080615101453 Swallows and Amazons

Swallows and Amazons for Ever!

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 18, Jim Ring on Arthur Ransome, Swallows and Amazons

The train from the south drew in to the junction with the line that led to the hills. We changed, and already there was freshness in the air on a day of azure skies and deep shadows. I went to admire the Puffing Billy that was to haul us on the last leg of our journey, inhaling the intoxicating cocktail of hot oil and steam that engines exude. The whistle blew, I ran back to the carriage, the doors slammed, and we clanked our way west with the setting sun. I hurried from side to side of the carriage . . .
20181019122442 Slightly Foxed October News: Forest School - BB, Brendon Chase

October News: Forest School

As the build-up to Christmas in all of its fun and exhausting glory fast approaches, the office foxes have been wondering if they could abandon the scaffold-clad confines of Hoxton Square for a spell in the forest. But then who would greet Paul from Smith Settle with the winter haul in a few weeks’ time, hand-write gift messages, swaddle parcels in tape and wrestle postbags downstairs for our cheery postman to collect each day? No! It simply won’t do. We are far too fond of our readers and conscious of their literary present requirements for that so, for this month’s mailing, we’re making do with a spot of armchair escapism with Brendon Chase instead . . .

20180901213551 Brendon Chase Slightly Foxed Cubs p104

Forest School

Helena Drysdale on BB, Brendon Chase

It’s the end of the Easter holidays, and Robin, John and Harold Hensman can’t face returning to their boarding-school. Their ‘people’ are in India, and for years they’ve been entrusted to the care of their fussy maiden aunt, assisted by the vicar. Banchester isn’t bad as English public schools go, but they are country boys who dread being trapped in a classroom when summer approaches and the great outdoors calls. They hatch a plan. They will escape and hide out like Robin Hood and his merry men in the eleven-thousand-acre forest of Brendon Chase . . .

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‘I truly love your publication . . .’

L. Bastien, USA

‘This past Christmas my husband gave me a gift subscription to your publication (I’m sure my having strategically placed your catalogue in places I was sure he’d see it helped him know what I really wanted . . .) Opening my mail box and finding a package addressed to me is a simple pleasure that makes me smile . . . even more so now as it will be from SF. I must tell you I truly love your publication. I knew I needed a subscription as soon as I received a back issue you sent me (no. 50) last February. I’m thoroughly enjoying having digital access now, as well. I bring my iPad to my daughter’s dance classes and read to my heart’s content. Thank you all!’ L. Bastien, United States
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‘A joy to hold in your hand . . .’

B. Davidson, London

‘Just a quick note to thank you for the delivery of my recent order of A Country Doctor’s Commonplace Book, a great surprise in this morning’s post, just as I hoped it would be, very dry and clever, plus the second copy is one Christmas present off the list. As usual these books are not only interesting and something I may not necessarily have come across with other publishers, but also a joy to hold in your hand. Many thanks.’ B. Davidson, London
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‘An absolute delight . . .’

J. Gilfrin, Hertfordshire

‘Dear all, I just wanted to thank you so much for my order of A Country Doctor’s Commonplace Book. It arrived last week, so carefully packed and in immaculate condition. I was particularly touched by the postcard with a message from Olivia enclosed with it, and the bookmark. The book itself, beautifully printed, is an absolute delight. If I find myself feeling a bit down, I pick it up and open at random, and immediately feel better! Many thanks for this and all your excellent publications, not least the wonderful quarterly magazine.’ J. Gilfrin, Hertfordshire
20180928172751 Slightly Foxed September News: This is the way light fell on the picture for me - Jennie Erdal, Ghosting

September News: This is the way light fell on the picture for me . . .

Greetings from No. 53, where the number of boxes is fast diminishing and the route to the kettle fast widening as the office foxes beaver away to get books into the hands of readers around the world . . . Please read on for an extract from the latest title in the SF Editions list, Jennie Erdal’s wickedly funny Ghosting: A Double Life, introduced by a snippet of SF editor Hazel’s article in the current issue of the quarterly.
20180928131247 Jennie Erdal Ghosting

Tiger the Literary Lion

Hazel Wood on Jennie Erdal, Ghosting

One day in 1981 a young woman found herself travelling from her Scottish home to London to meet a publisher. So far so predictable perhaps. She had read Russian at university and had recently translated the memoirs of the painter Leonid Pasternak, father of the more famous Boris. There was nothing predictable about this meeting, however, and the man waiting for her at the door of his Mayfair flat was no ordinary publisher. This is how she describes him.
20180914175430 Slightly Foxed September News: Wonders & Absurdities

September News: Wonders & Absurdities

Each Christmas for the past sixteen years Dr Philip Evans has sent his friends and family a small booklet of ‘wonders and absurdities’ gleaned from many different sources over the year. When he sent the booklets to us they made us laugh so much we decided to publish a selection. The result is A Country Doctor’s Commonplace Book, a very personal look at the pleasures and eccentricities of English life from a well-read individual with a keen sense of humour and many decades of observing his fellow men and women in his work as a Suffolk GP. Altogether this is a little book we’d say you can’t do without in these serious and uncertain times . . .
20190114110353 Chris Wormell Slightly Foxed Fox Web

Slightly Foxed Issue 60: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

Well, this issue is our 60th, and it’s making us feel a bit ruminative – emotional even – remembering the little group (four plus a baby) who sat round Gail’s kitchen table, discussing an idea for a magazine that we weren’t at all sure would work. The baby is at secondary school now and the original four has nearly trebled, if we count all the great people, both full-time and part-time and with ages ranging over six decades, who contribute to the production of Slightly Foxed.
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‘Thank you so much for your help and patience . . .’

C. Parker, Norwich

‘To whichever kind person stayed online and on the phone this afternoon as I ploughed on trying to place an order for your Summer-Clean. I have since been into my online account and enjoyed whizzing through all the options. I don’t know what I was doing wrong but thank you so much for your help and patience on such a hot day and when you’re in the midst of so much internet activity. Stars all!’
20180811111242 Slightly Foxed Paperback Rosemary Sutcliff, Blue Remembered Hills

‘I have nearly finished Blue Remembered Hills which is wonderful . . .’

C. Gillespie, Surrey

‘Hattie (if I may), I have nearly finished Blue Remembered Hills which is wonderful and I’m so glad I found your site. The packaging was excellent and showed real care in looking after books and thanks for the catalogue and bookmark – always useful. Pity you aren’t in South London! (for me anyway.) Looking forward to dealing with you again and thanks for an extremely prompt transaction. Cheers.’
20180813180725 Slightly Foxed Newsletter, Marching with Marlborough

August News: Marching with Marlborough

It is August 1704 and the Duke of Marlborough is leading an allied army through the Low Countries to challenge the Catholic Louis XIV of France, who has his eye on the Spanish throne . . .

Do read on for an introduction to Ronald Welch’s Captain of Dragoons, a wonderfully atmospheric and fast-moving book set during the early years of the War of the Spanish Succession, by our dear – now sadly departed – friend, reader and regular contributor Jeremy Lewis.
20180807163056 Gerry Cotter, Second-hand Book Fairs - Article for Slightly Foxed

All the Fun of the Fair

Gerry Cotter on Second-hand Book Fairs

It was only after I retired that I looked along my bookshelves and realized there were many books I was never going to open again – so why not try to sell them? I signed up to sell online and was delighted when Heidegger’s Being and Time, unopened for decades and then only very briefly, sold the next day. This was evidently a Good Idea. I had been attending book fairs for years, so the next step was obvious: take a stall at a fair . . .

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‘In the pages of Slightly Foxed I have found my people . . .’

C. Whittemore, Gloucestershire

‘The current SF has many treasures; I’m especially struck by Sarah Perry’s piece on The Blue Field – I adore these blue flowers, admire Sarah Perry, and love ‘the Englishness of parsnip wine drunk in imprudent quantities . . .’ And how good to see Robin Blake on The Man on a Donkey, a much-loved book in my childhood home that I thought forgotten. So, in the pages of Slightly Foxed I have found my people . . .’
20180711121419 Slightly Foxed Issue 55 illustration, spitfires in formation

A Confrontation with Evil

Ursula Buchan on Richard Hillary, The Last Enemy

It seems a rather odd thing to admit these days, but I spent much of my youth reading war comics and watching war films. That’s how it was if you lived in a house filled with boys in the 1960s. As a result I can still recite, without recourse to Wikipedia, the names of the three men who won a bar to the Victoria Cross (Chavasse, Martin- Leake and Upham, if you are interested), and I can easily recall the boiling hot afternoons during the summer holidays that I spent at Tobruk or on the Normandy beaches, flying low over the Möhne dam or high in the skies above Kent – all while sitting in a 1/9d seat at the Regal Cinema, Wallingford . . .

20180626163335 Hurricane Clarice. Slightly Foxed magazine archives: Clarice Lispector

Hurricane Clarice

Michael Marett-Crosby on Clarice Lispector. Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 37

The sleeper lounge is old-fashioned British Rail, all tartan carpet, smeared tables and microwave cuisine. Tonight it contains a gathering of solitaries, all of us making separate journeys to London. The man beside me is still working, though it’s nearly ten o’clock. By chance we order the same whisky. We raise our plastic glasses, embarrassed in a very British way. I want to encourage him. He is at war with a pile of papers. But he is wishing me good luck as well. He has been glancing at the author’s face on the back cover of my novel. She does rather stare . . .
20180705150423 Rachel Khoo, Little Paris Kitchen, Slightly Foxed Issue 36

Attics with Attitude

Elisabeth Russell Taylor on Rachel Khoo, Little Paris Kitchen

I am sometimes asked which writers have changed my life. Next time I shall not answer ‘Proust’ but ‘Rachel Khoo’. For five years, since the death of my husband, I had all but given up cooking and eating, all but forgotten what I had valued before my personal doomsday. Rachel Khoo has re-engaged my taste-buds and my enthusiasm. I may even convert my fantasy dinner parties into real ones. I am already making lists . . .

20180704121626 Clare Leighton

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

Clare Leighton

In Issue 58 of Slightly Foxed, Richard Platt reintroduced us to Henry Thoreau, his tragic tale of loss and his literary road to recovery. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers was written after Henry fled to the woods to work the land and build a cabin, running away from grief and depression that followed the death of his brother. This decoration by Clare Leighton appeared on the cover of the American edition of his book.
20180625185121

A Late Victorian Afternoon

Mark Jones on Mollie Panter-Downes, At the Pines

They seemed reasonable enough requests. Don’t lie on the bed naked in case passing servants catch an eyeful. Also, in mixed company, could he try to swear only in French? Modest pleas made by Theodore Watts-Dunton to the poet and ex-libertine Algernon Charles Swinburne when they first set up home together. It was 1879 and Swinburne’s relish for brandy and flagellation had reached a critical point. In the nick of time, Watts-Dunton, the gallant walrus-moustached solicitor-turned-author, had plucked his friend from the depths and carried him off for a spot of detox in Putney.
20180611101234 June News from Slightly Foxed: Denis Constanduros, Noises and Places, Father's Day Gifts

June News: Noises and Places

Summer is now in full swing here at Slightly Foxed. The new issue of the quarterly has travelled far and wide to subscribers all over the globe, and whether you too are off to far-flung places this summer, or simply staying at home, we hope you’ll find it good company.

In this month’s newsletter we’re celebrating fathers and grandfathers with Denis Constanduros’s charming memoirs, My Grandfather and Father, Dear Father, published together for the first time as our 20th Slightly Foxed Edition. Do read on for an extract from this charming book, and a few suggestions for presents for this coming Father’s Day or, indeed, for any occasion.
20180620111300 Kathleen Lindsley - Robert Macfarlane

Cooling off – Dunvegan

Kathleen Lindsley

‘Reading Haldane has transformed the way I understand the Highlands. He taught me how to follow on foot the routes of the drove roads, and to look for the patches of open ground that would have been the “stances” of the drovers: the resting-places, close to water and on level ground, where the men could sleep and the livestock could graze. And he introduced me to the drovers themselves: these hard men, the long-distance lorry-drivers of their day, accustomed to the boredoms and rigours of their journeys, and equipped with internalized sat-navs of astonishing accuracy. They navigated not from maps but from memories, stories and gossip . . .’
20180529112342 May News from Slightly Foxed: John Moore & a kind of Englishness

May News: A kind of Englishness

Greetings once more from No. 53 Hoxton Square. The turn of the quarter is almost upon us and we have the pressing – and cheering – business of good reading to report. The cream pages of the summer issue of Slightly Foxed, No. 58: ‘A Snatch of Morning’, have rolled off the printing presses up at Smith Settle, been pressed, nipped, trimmed, sewn and bound, and then lovingly stuffed into handsome (and ecologically friendly) sturdy brown envelopes and bundled into postbags to begin their journey around the world . . . And we’re off to Brensham with our 42nd Slightly Foxed Edition, The Blue Field, and a snippet of Sarah Perry’s lovely preface by way of introduction.
20180523135123 Anne Hayward Sarah Perry Article John Moore The Blue Field

Sprouts and Parsnip Wine

Sarah Perry on John Moore, The Blue Field

Early one morning, late in July, the villagers of ‘crack-brained Brensham’ woke to a remarkable spectacle. There amid the customary colours of furze and wheat was a seven-acre field that ‘had suddenly become tinctured with the colour of Mediterranean skies’. Nothing like it had ever happened before, so that the villagers caught their breath at the sight of this miracle: a great, vivid patch of cerulean ‘so clear and pure that it made one think of eyes or skies’ . . .
20180514170116 Divine Spark. Slightly Foxed magazine archives: Muriel Spark

Divine Spark

Emma Hogan on Muriel Spark

I first came across Spark when working in a little second-hand bookshop off the Charing Cross Road. A battered tome of her selected works was on sale in the outside pile, desolately stationed there to be picked over by tourists and dampened by rain. Not having much to do (the shop closed a month later, not necessarily because I’d worked there) I started reading one afternoon, and was hooked. For while Muriel Spark makes you laugh out loud, she also makes you think – she must, I feel, have been a formidable dinner-party companion, quietly sitting there with her razor-sharp tongue . . .

20180514155938 Laura, Louisa and Me. Slightly Foxed: Daisy Hay on Childhood Reading

Laura, Louisa and Me

Daisy Hay on her childhood reading

The Child that Books Built is the title of a memoir by Francis Spufford which explores the impact of books read in childhood by interspersing an account of Spufford’s own reading with excursions into history, philosophy and psychology. It beautifully articulates the formative nature of childhood literary exploration. ‘The words we take into ourselves help to shape us,’ Spufford writes. ‘They help form the questions we think are worth asking; they shift around the boundaries of the sayable inside us . . . They build and stretch and build again the chambers of our imagination.’
20180510150858 Slightly Foxed Issue 16: Strangely Like Real Life, Grant McIntyre on Anthony Powell

Strangely Like Real Life

Grant McIntyre on Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time

My own prime favourite is Anthony Powell’s sequence of novels A Dance to the Music of Time: panoramic, sharply observed, farcical, ironic, yet shot through with what Kingsley Amis called an endlessly inquisitive melancholy. We shadow the narrator Nick Jenkins from the callow half-understanding of youth, in the Twenties, through the drastic remaking of lives and relationships by war, to late middle age in the heady Sixties and Seventies – a whole new age of absurdity against which the novel’s various endgames are played out . . .
20180423101212 Slightly Foxed April News: The Call of the Sea

April News: The Call of the Sea

Inspired by the call of the sea, for this week’s newsletter we dived into the Slightly Foxed archives and fished around for something suitably watery. We floated past some very good pieces on Swallows and Amazons (Issue 18), Patrick O’Brian (Issues 40, 42, 44) and The Compleat Angler (Issue 54), but we were looking for something a little more unusual. A few more kicks and there it was: nineteenth-century fisherman on the east coast of Scotland, a lost love and plenty of adventure. So off we go to sea, with Galen O’Hanlon on Neil M. Gunn’s The Silver Darlings.
20180329173725 That unsettling misunderstanding over the eggs. A Late Beginner

March News: That unsettling misunderstanding over the eggs

For this newsletter we’re travelling to Cairo with a young Priscilla Napier to investigate an unsettling egg-related incident in an extract from A Late Beginner, introduced by Penelope Lively whose latest memoir – Life in the Garden – is one of our favourite books published in recent months. Please read on for an extract and, to follow, a few spring reading ideas, some missives from readers and new subscriber offers from Foxed Friends.
20180425120041 Neil M. Gunn, The Silver Darlings, Slightly Foxed Shop

The Call of the Sea

Galen O’Hanlon on Neil M. Gunn, The Silver Darlings

It’s a wonderful thing when a book so fires the imagination that it becomes more real than the world around you, when the mind is totally absorbed, the page dissolves, and you begin to exist differently. It was mainly a thing of long childhood summers, when I was a musketeer, then a Viking, a wizard, a centaur – once even a quickfooted warrior mouse. Sadly it stopped in adolescence, when these things weren’t done . . .
20180328122733 Ian Stephens - Pigs

Pigs

Ian Stephens

‘“Those are good pigs,” he said, “aren’t they?”
If he had said they were bad pigs I should have agreed with him equally. Their shape meant nothing to me.
“Good length,” he explained, “broad in the back and not too much head.”
I strove to see it, but no person can appreciate the points of a pig till he has dwelt long with them.
Looking back, I cannot tell at what point I began to know a good pig from a bad one. The farmer’s eye is as subtle as the artist’s.’
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‘This was an exceptional shortlist . . .’

Sam Leith, The Spectator

‘I had the privilege – alongside the wise and learned Caroline Moorehead and Ian Kelly – of helping judge this year’s Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize, which was last night awarded to Edmund Gordon for his superb The Invention of Angela Carter . . . This was an exceptional shortlist, in which every book showed not only thorough knowledge of its subject but deep and sympathetic understanding. And from the Tudor court, to the battlefields of the first world war, from a busy obs/gynae ward on the NHS to the august halls of the National Gallery, from a book-lined study to a Japanese love-hotel, we were thoroughly immersed in the worlds these books inhabit.’
20180308131309 News from Slightly Foxed: A beautiful mother who adored him

March News: A beautiful mother who adored him

Greetings from Hoxton Square where the new quarter’s usual delightful flurry of orders is keeping the office foxes on their toes. Ordinarily we send out a newsletter just once a month, so you may be wondering why you’ve now received two in fairly swift succession. Well, in last week’s missive we rashly promised we’d be in touch again soon with some further suggestions for Mothering Sunday presents. We suspect that most of you have been extremely well-organised and have already placed your orders by now, but we did promise so if you are in need of some last-minute ideas you’ll find a few suggestions in this newsletter . . .
20180301130725 March News from Slightly Foxed: Collar as Dawn. Back as Snowdrop.

February News: Collar as Dawn. Back as Snowdrop.

Meteorologically speaking, we are still deep in mid-winter, but here at Slightly Foxed the new quarter waits not for the weather, so we are delighted to announce that it is now, officially, spring. Thanks to the sterling work of Tracey and her team at Smith Settle printers in Yorkshire, the new issue of the quarterly: No. 57, ‘A Crowning Achievement’, is now on its way to readers all around the world. Whether you make the most of the inclement weather and curl up in a favourite chair to devour it immediately or wait for a fair day for some al fresco reading, we do hope you’ll enjoy its typically eclectic collection of good writing and good reading . . .
20180522121153 Cover illustration by Debbie George Debbie George has been a painter for over twenty years. Her work is a celebration of her passion for flowers and the objects with which she surrounds herself. She finds inspiration in many forms, ranging from ceramics and plants to books and wallpaper, textiles and landscape. Assembling flowers or objects within the foreground of a painting and setting them against a variety of backdrops, Debbie builds up layers of paint that create a wonderful luminosity and depth. For more of her work see www.debbiegeorge.co.uk.

Cover Artist: Issue 58, Debbie George, ‘Forget me not’

Debbie George has been a painter for over twenty years. Her work is a celebration of her passion for flowers and the objects with which she surrounds herself. She finds inspiration in many forms, ranging from ceramics and plants to books and wallpaper, textiles and landscape. Assembling flowers or objects within the foreground of a painting and setting them against a variety of backdrops, Debbie builds up layers of paint that create a wonderful luminosity and depth.
20180221124033 Miriam McGregor - Somerset Garden

Somerset Garden

Miriam McGregor

‘She rises still. A region must be found unhaunted by birds, that else might profane the mystery. She rises still; and already the ill-assorted troop below are dwindling and falling asunder. The feeble, infirm, the aged, unwelcome, ill fed, who have flown from inactive or impoverished cities – these renounce the pursuit and disappear in the void. Only a small, indefatigable cluster remain, suspended in infinite opal. She summons her wings for one final effort; and now the chosen of incomprehensible forces has reached her, has seized her, and, bounding aloft with united impetus, the ascending spiral of their intertwined flight whirls for one second in the hostile madness of love.’
20171222171552 Susan Einzig - Maggie Fergusson, Tom’s Midnight Garden, When the Clock Struck Thirteen

When the Clock Struck Thirteen

Maggie Fergusson on Philippa Pearce, Tom’s Midnight Garden

A lot of the stories I loved most as a child involved doors. Aged about 4, I suppose, I passed through the small, latched door in the hillside, into Mrs Tiggywinkle’s flagged kitchen, filled with the ‘nice, hot, singey smell’ of ironing, busy and reassuring. A few years later came the doors into Narnia, the Secret Garden and Wonderland, Bilbo Baggins’s ‘perfectly round’ green door with its shiny yellow brass knob ‘in the exact middle’, the door into the Yellow Dwarf ’s home in the orange tree, and the dark door into Bluebeard’s bloody chamber . . .

But reading to my own children, the door I’ve been happiest to pass through again is the door into Tom’s Midnight Garden – a door one can only imagine because, unlike most of the others, it is never described.
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Uncomfortable Truths

Diana Athill on W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz

There is no book more haunting than W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz. I would not advise anyone unfamiliar with his earlier books to make it their introduction to his work, because his decision to do away, in this one, with paragraphs, and the way in which the narrative unfolds, are disconcerting enough when first encountered to be off-putting. It is necessary to make an act of trust – to put yourself in his hands; and this may be a problem for anyone who has not yet learned to trust him by reading his wonderful The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn and Vertigo. I doubt whether I would have persisted beyond the first thirty-odd pages of Austerlitz if I hadn’t already learned that wherever Sebald led, I must follow him . . .

20171018165647 Judith Jaidinger - The Three Mothers

The Three Mothers

Judith Jaidinger

‘One image of a veiled woman was all net and nose. Then, by laying down carefully pared pieces of onion-skin tissue-paper behind the place where the impression would be made, Brian brought out and made visible the expression of traumatized, envious sympathy the artist had engraved into the wood in her depiction of the woman’s face. It slowly came alive at his touch – though Brian would pass the credit back to the artist who created the picture. I suppose he is right; but his contribution is closer to that of a concert pianist interpreting a score than that of an engineer.’
20170920161814 The Little Grey Men and Down The Bright Stream

‘It brought back to me all the magical delight that my mother and I shared . . .’

J.C.

‘I have just opened my newly delivered Slightly Foxed and gone straight to the article about The Little Grey Men and Down the Bright Stream. It has brought back to me all the magical delight that my mother and I shared in reading them together. We had no hollow oak on our land but how I longed to live in one. Such yearnings don’t quite go away! I have just ordered the pair from SF. (Books that is, not hollow oaks).’
20170610112034 John Nash - Adrian Bell, Silver Ley, Preface, Melissa Harrison

From the Farmhouse Window

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 46, Melissa Harrison on Adrian Bell, Silver Ley

The middle volume of Adrian Bell’s inter-war farming trilogy, Silver Ley (1931), is, in its quiet, unassuming way, the most poignant memoir I think I have ever read. Picking up where his first book Corduroy left off, it opens in 1921 as Bell wakes up for the very first time on his own Suffolk farm, full of hope, with two newly bought heavy horses, Darkie and Dewdrop, stamping in the yard . . .

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Cover Artist: Issue 55, Jemma Lewis, Hand-marbled paper, ‘Bloomsbury Blue & Orange Botanical’

After graduating in Textile Art in Norwich Jemma Lewis worked for several years at a local bookbinding firm where she became fascinated with the marbled papers found on the binding of antiquarian books. She set up her own marbling business in 2009 and now works with her husband Craig in a purpose-built log cabin in their garden in Wiltshire. Their marbled papers are created by using traditional techniques, floating gouache paints on to a ‘size’ of carragheen moss, an Irish seaweed. They produce collections of both traditional and contemporary marbled papers, and often combine the two, using a modern-day palette to update historic designs.
20170803161109 Sword of Bone, Anthony Rhodes, Slightly Foxed

August News: Dunkirk – An unofficial history

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that the book of the film is usually rather better than the film itself, as Jane Austen certainly never said, but we like to think she would agree. Having not yet seen Christopher Nolan’s latest cinematic offering, Dunkirk, we shall have to reserve judgement on this occasion, but we can be absolutely certain that as memoirs from the Second World War go, and especially those related to Dunkirk, Anthony Rhodes’s Sword of Bone is outstanding.
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‘Here’s to good reading . . .’

E. Hanson, USA

‘I’m sorry to say that I never made it to your office in Hoxton Square while visiting London back in March, but I have purchased two of your wonderful Slightly Foxed editions. They are lovely and the quality is what I expected it would be. I plan on ordering more books in the near future. I was curious how you chose your titles to print and how many titles you plan to make in the future. I think 100 would be a nice number, maybe ambitious but maybe you have plans for more. Lucky for the rest of us. Thank you for making these lovely books and here’s to good reading.’ E. Hanson, USA
20170721172908 Holiday reading, Slightly Foxed

July News: Re. your request for ideas for holiday reading:-

Once a month or so throughout the year, we meet around the kitchen table here at No. 53 to discuss the all-important ins and outs of Slightly Foxed business. We pore over officious spreadsheets and schedules, mutter about analytics and databases, discuss logistics for our annual Readers’ Day, mull over binding cloth and endpaper colour combinations, and then rattle through marketing before getting down to the VIP business of jollity. And, what could be jollier than not one, but two summer wayzgooses?
20170721145355 Miles Kington

‘Just people being enthusiastic, almost evangelical, about books and writers . . .’

Miles Kington, writing in the Independent, December 2007

‘I come to you today to sing the praises of something which restores the colour to the cheeks of the word “bookish”, namely the magazine called Slightly Foxed. Have you come across this? You have to keep your eyes open as it is a quarterly – the issues are Spring, Summer, etc – and is entirely dedicated to pieces by writers about other writers they have loved, or feel are neglected, or whom we may take for granted . . .
20170726144549 Kathleen Lindsley, Tawny Owl Issue 43

Tawny Owl

Kathleen Lindsley

From the very first issue of Slightly Foxed we’ve championed the art of wood engraving as a form of book illustration and, over the years, have reproduced a wide variety of works by some of the best artists in the field. These richly detailed illustrations became so popular with our readers that we decided to give some of our favourite works a life outside the bounds of text illustration and, from the autumn 2014 issue, have run an occasional series of standalone features on engravers. This Tawny Owl by Kathleen Lindsley was the first to be featured in our Slightly Foxed wood engravers series.
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Plain Jane? Plain Wrong

Daisy Hay on Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

There is nothing ‘common-place’ about Pride and Prejudice. It has a tightly woven, seductively intricate plot, which unfolds so delicately that the reader falls blindly into the traps of imperception set by the author, alongside that most perfect of imperfect heroines, Elizabeth Bennet. It has dialogue which sparkles and sings in the most extraordinary way, so that characters come alive in only a few words. It has a hero and heroine who fence and fight and fall in love . . .

20170718121720

Ploughing On

Hazel Wood, Preface to Adrian Bell, The Cherry Tree

The writer Adrian Bell first arrived in Suffolk in 1920 – a delicate young would-be poet, fresh from public school at Uppingham and the polite drawing-rooms of Chelsea, under pressure from his father, who was news editor of the Observer, to get a proper job. He was, he says, ‘flying from the threat of office life’ when he first presented himself for work on the farm of an old-established farming family in the countryside near Bury St Edmunds.
20170627131401

The Spell of Stout Angus

Robert Macfarlane on James Stout Angus, A Glossary of the Shetland Dialect

In a poem written near the end of his life, W. S. Graham imagined himself as a ‘wordy ghost’, ‘floating across the frozen tundra / of the lexicon and the dictionary’. Like Graham – like many people – I am also a ‘wordy ghost’, who loves haunting the pages of lexicons, dictionaries and glossaries. Unlike Graham I find the pages of such books to be not ‘frozen tundra’, sterile and barren – but fabulous forests, alive with delving word-roots and spreading canopies of connotation.
20170612161824 Father's Day Presents Slightly Foxed Header

June News: There was this cock-sparrow, my father . . .

In V. S. Pritchett’s wonderful memoir of his childhood and youth, A Cab at the Door, ‘VSP’, as his friends called him, grew up in the shadow of a father whom his own son, our regular contributor Oliver, describes as very like Dickens’s Mr Micawber – expansive, extravagant, insanely optimistic, always certain that ‘something would turn up’. Usually it didn’t – hence the ‘cab at the door’, waiting to bear the family quietly away from another clutch of creditors . . .
20170609145045 Slightly Foxed Paperback V. S. Pritchett, A Cab at the Door

Avid to Live and Learn

Anne Boston on V. S. Pritchett, A Cab at the Door

I shall always be grateful to A Cab at the Door. I read most of it one Sunday evening in a Victoria line tube train which was stuck for two hours outside King’s Cross station. The train lights dimmed and instead of the Blitz spirit a sullen, twitchy silence set in. I was spectacularly lucky in my companion. The sheer vigour of V. S. Pritchett’s writing and his benign, shrewd storyteller’s voice kept me suspended in his Edwardian boyhood until ‘the juice’, as the panic-stricken driver called it, came back on and we trundled away at last.
20170601163140 John Watson-Slightly Foxed Issue 54 From the Editors Illustration

Slightly Foxed Issue 54: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

The trees are in full deep green leaf now, making a small oasis of Hoxton Square, while not fifty yards away the traffic roars past along Old Street. New regulations to cut down air pollution in London are on the way we learn, but now the fumes hang heavily in the summer air as we make for the office, dodging people coming in the other direction who seem to be talking to themselves but are actually on their mobile phones. As Jane Austen’s great hypochondriac Mr Woodhouse observes, ‘Nobody is healthy in London, nobody can be.’ For many of us these days it’s a hurrying, worrying world . . .
20170802174732 Rosalind Bliss, Crocuses - Issue 33

Crocuses

Rosalind Bliss

‘When you see your Crocuses wide open in flower sally forth with a stick of sealing-wax or the amber mouthpiece of an old pipe in your hand . . . Rub whichever of the two unusual accompaniments of a garden stroll you have chosen, on your coat-sleeve if it be woollen, and hold the rubbed portion as soon as possible after ceasing rubbing near the anthers of an open Crocus, and you will find the electricity thereby generated will cause the pollen grains to fly up to the electrified object, and, what is more, to stick there, but so lightly that directly they are rubbed against the stigma of another Crocus they will leave the amber and be left where you, and Nature before you, intended them to be.’ Essential instructions from E. A. Bowles . . . if you were wondering how to pollinate crocuses. Ursula Buchan introduced us to the green-fingered Bowles in her article on My Garden in Spring, which was featured in Issue 33 of Slightly Foxed and was illustrated by this woodcut from Rosalind Bliss.
20170531144937 Strawberries, Simon Brett

Strawberries

Simon Brett

‘Strawberries, and only strawberries, could now be thought or spoken of. “The best fruit in England — every body’s favourite — always wholesome. — These the finest beds and finest sorts. — Delightful to gather for one’s self — the only way of really enjoying them — delicious fruit — only too rich to be eaten much of — inferior to cherries — currants more refreshing — only objection to gathering strawberries the stooping — glaring sun . . .“’
20161201094355 Cazalet Chronicles - Elizabeth Jane Howard - Set

At Home with the Cazalets

Sarah Perry on Elizabeth Jane Howard, The Cazalet Chronicles

‘All happy families resemble one another,’ said Tolstoy, rather sweepingly, ‘but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ The Anna Karenina principle has so long been taken for a truism one hesitates to disagree, but on reading Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet Chronicles it occurred to me that there’s no such thing as a happy family – how could there be? – and that if there were, it would be a most unsatisfactory subject for a novel.
20170510165143 Geri Waddington, Peacock Garden

Peacock Garden

Geri Waddington

‘Swift knows about containment and spillage. It’s the basic dynamic of her garden. In summer the plants billow out over the clipped box hedges that mark the borders, and roses ramble profusely away from their arbours. In winter, with the disappearance of summer’s temporary improvisations, the straight lines of the garden are revealed, dark evergreen and brown.’ Alexandra Harris wrote of the joy of reading Katherine Swift’s The Morville Hours in Issue 50, accompanied by Geri Waddington’s wonderful woodcut.
20170501184343 The Hook of Holland, A Literary Hike

It was still a couple of hours till dawn when we dropped anchor in the Hook of Holland . . .

Patrick Leigh Fermor

Snow covered everything and the flakes blew in a slant across the cones of the lamps and confused the glowing discs that spaced out the untrodden quay. I hadn’t known that Rotterdam was a few miles inland. I was still the only passenger in the train and this solitary entry, under cover of night and hushed by snow, completed the illusion that I was slipping into Rotterdam, and into Europe, through a secret door . . .
20170426124214 Rosalind Bliss, Ducks and Daffodils

Ducks and Daffodils

Rosalind Bliss

Today’s woodcut first appeared on the contents page of Slightly Foxed Issue 33 in Spring 2012. Rosalind Bliss is a landscape artist based in the UK. She learned the rudiments of wood engraving from her father, the painter and art conservationist Douglas Percy Bliss, but went on to train as mural painter at Edinburgh College of Art. Later in life she turned again to engraving, working as a book illustrator and designing bookplates. She lives in Derbyshire, and is still producing paintings, wood engravings and murals, which she paints on to folding screens.
20170419165517 Issue 33 - Peter Reddick

A World of Shining Beauty

Peter Reddick

‘His descriptions are precise in every line, shaded so cleverly that the whole ninety pages work on you like a painting by Seurat. The dabs of colour are pretty enough – but stand back and there lies an entire landscape . . .’ wrote Gee Williams in A World of Shining Beauty, an article on John Masefield’s 1966 memoir Grace before Ploughing from Slightly Foxed, Issue 33. While there may not be dabs of colour in this week’s wood engraving, Peter Reddick has beautifully captured this rural landscape of rolling hills and spring meadows.
20161102115420 Ysenda Maxtone Graham, Terms & Conditions, Plain Foxed Edition

Old Girls and Very Old Girls

Nicola Shulman, Preface to Ysenda Maxtone Graham Terms & Conditions: Life in Girls’ Boarding-Schools, 1939-1979

I went to a girls’ boarding-school in 1972. It was only for an afternoon. I’d been staying with a friend for half-term and we stopped on our way into London to drop her older sister back at school. I can’t remember which it was. Wycombe Abbey? Cobham Hall? Or Benenden, then of matchless fame for the education of Princess Anne? Though I’d never actually been inside a boarding-school, I knew all about them from books like Third Form at Malory Towers by the evidence-based historian, as I supposed she was, Enid Blyton.
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The Captive Reader: ‘Every December, I attend an Old Girls reunion . . .’

The Captive Reader

‘Every December, I attend an Old Girls reunion and Christmas carol service for my old school. It’s a fun event and I always meet the most interesting women.
There’s the Olympian with stories about her time in Brazil this summer, the children’s book author who I adored growing up, the researchers doing amazing work in their labs, and the retirees who now travel the world after lives spent in law, medicine or academia. It’s a circle I take for granted much of the time but always appreciate reconnecting with around the holidays. It is also a chance to cuddle babies of younger alum while eating cookies with the school logo on them – a win-win, really . . .’
20160108150929 ‘Something nasty in the woodshed’, by Mark Handley

Poste-Freudian Therapy

Michele Hanson on Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm

It is generally thought that Stella Gibbons was mocking Mary Webb’s Precious Bane when she wrote Cold Comfort Farm, but she was probably having a pop at all those purveyors of country hardship, sex, doom and slop, Hardy and Lawrence included. One can easily tire of the lush, dripping, thrusting, tragic, moist, fecund countryside, and long for a brisk young woman from the tough pavements of town like Flora Poste to come along and tidy things up a bit . . .
20160805163248 Anthony Rhodes, Sword of Bone, Slightly Foxed Editions

Hanging Out on the Maginot Line

Michael Barber, Preface to Anthony Rhodes, Sword of Bone

In 1989 I was commissioned to write and present a programme about the Phoney War for BBC Radio 4. My research took me to the Imperial War Museum’s sound archives and the testimony of a Dunkirk veteran called Anthony Rhodes, who was commissioned into the Royal Engineers shortly before Britain declared war on Nazi Germany in September 1939. At that stage I’d no idea Rhodes had written a book about his experiences, but what he had to say on tape was exemplary . . .
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Slightly Foxed Issue 50: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

We had quite a celebration for our tenth anniversary in 2014 and now this summer we’ve reached what feels to us like another significant milestone – our 50th issue. You could say Slightly Foxed has reached middle age, but it still has a spring in its step and we enjoy putting it together as much now as we did when four of us sat round the kitchen table (one of us holding a baby who is now at secondary school) and planned the first issue . . .
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Happy Ever After

Daisy Hay on Daisy Ashford, The Young Visiters

The Young Visiters was published in 1919 but written in 1890, when its author was 9. It appeared with a Preface by J. M. Barrie and with the manuscript’s many spelling mistakes faithfully reproduced. Within two years it had sold 230,000 copies, given rise to a stage play, and caused a rumpus in literary London. It has never been out of print since. This is an exceptional record for a slight work. Why was The Young Visiters so popular and why does it endure?
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Cover Artist: Issue 52, Mark Hearld, ‘Papercut Foxes’

Born in 1974, Mark Hearld studied illustration at Glasgow School of Art and then completed an MA in Natural History Illustration at the Royal College of Art. Taking his inspiration from the flora and fauna of the British countryside, he works across a number of mediums, producing limited-edition lithographic and linocut prints, paintings, collages and hand-painted ceramics. He has completed commissions for Faber & Faber, Tate Museums and Walker Books. In 2012 Merrell Books published Mark Hearld’s Work Book – the first book devoted to Mark’s work.
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Kindred Spirits

Liz Robinson on Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

Do you treasure ancient paperbacks, spines gone, pages browning, brittle and crumbling, held together (or not quite) with perished elastic bands, simply because you also treasure the memories they evoke as much by their physical appearance as by their contents?

Do you treasure ancient paperbacks, spines gone, pages browning, brittle and crumbling, held together (or not quite) with perished elastic bands, simply because you also treasure the memories they evoke as much by their physical appearance as by their contents? . . .
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An unchanging ritual . . .

Ted Walker, The High Path

When he came home of an evening, we went through an unchanging ritual. Hanging on the gate, I could tell the shape of him as he cruised the last half-mile along the Brighton Road on the Ariel. Just our side of Chandler’s Corner he would switch off the petrol for the sake of economy and freewheel silently the rest of the way, having judged his impetus so exactly that the merest touch of the brakes would halt him after the front wheel bumped over the kerb. The bike would be wheeled into the outhouse, suddenly full of the stirring odour of hot oil and the clicking of cooling metal. And then, in the kitchen, even had I been blindfolded, I could have recognised him; for he brought into the house an entire anthology of smells I associated with nobody else . . .

20150901173006 SLIGHTLY FOXED EDITIONS No. 31 THE HOUSE OF ELRIG Gavin Maxwell

Mowgli with a Gun

Galen O'Hanlon, Preface to Gavin Maxwell, The House of Elrig

A few months before his thirteenth birthday, the young and miserable Gavin Maxwell crept out of St Wulfric’s prep school to send a ‘thoroughly hysterical’ letter to his mother. At the end of it he wrote, ‘For God’s sake take me away from this awful place.’ She answered his plea, and he was whisked away in the middle of the Spring term, ‘a quaking jelly of misery and self-pity’. He went straight home, to the House of Elrig – the house he grew up in on the edge of the vast Monreith estate in Galloway, surrounded by woods and peat bogs and heather. I was also a quaking jelly at school. I would long for the holidays, when we would pack up and drive to Scotland, to be dragged through ever thicker rain in search of ever rarer birds. My friends saw the sun in August. I saw the Shetland wren. So I find Maxwell’s books deeply comforting: none more so than The House of Elrig (1965), which describes in lucid detail the impossible social awkwardness of school, and the irresistible freedom of the natural world . . .
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Curiouser and Curiouser

Brandon Robshaw on Robert Aickman

All of Aickman’s tales (he wrote 48 in all) include some kind of supernatural element. ‘Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal’ is a vampire story, ‘Ringing the Changes’ is a zombie story, others feature ghostly visitants of various kinds. But that in itself is not what is strange about them. The characters are strange. The events are strange. The scenarios are strange. It’s hard to convey the special, unsettling atmosphere of Aickman’s work to anyone who isn’t acquainted with it; but let me try . . .
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Surprised by Joy

Jonathan Law on The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner

It’s always strange to think how easily you might not have met that someone: a bus that arrived on time, or a last drink at the bar, and it might all have been quite different. Our meetings with books can be equally subject to fluke. I was in the queue at Barter Books in Alnwick, a clutch of holiday reading under my arm, when for no reason at all I picked up a green Virago paperback: The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner
20160902123703 From the Editors, Slightly Foxed Issue 51, Autumn 2016

Slightly Foxed Issue 51: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

After the events of the past few months, we must admit that, though extremely cheerful and optimistic, we’re also feeling a bit ruminative here in the office. Somehow the timeless and civilizing things we hope Slightly Foxed stands for seem more important than ever at a moment of change like this. We hope, anyway, that with the arrival of this autumn issue you can relax, draw the curtains – actual or metaphorical – and, as one of our American readers recently described it, ‘breathe a sigh of relief and slip into a world of thoughtfulness and good humor’.
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Nicholas Carey

Ronald Welch

New this autumn in the Slightly Foxed Cubs series.

It is 1853, and on holiday in Italy, Captain Nicholas Carey is persuaded by his impulsive cousin Andrew to help three Italian revolutionaries avoid capture and escape the Papal States. After returning to England, Nicholas runs his cousin to earth in Paris, where he is still involved with the revolutionaries, and the two foil an assassination attempt on the Emperor, Napoleon III. More . . .