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

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14th March 2019

‘I saw an elderly gentleman reading it on the train. . .’

‘I saw an elderly gentleman reading it on the train, it looked so enticing. He has been reading since the first edition and was full of praise. I had to subscribe and see for myself!’
- J. Hughes, Surrey
From readers

‘I am looking forward to the next podcast . . .’

‘I am looking forward to the next podcast, they are not only interesting in their own right but it makes me feel I am actually in Hoxton . . . Keep ‘poding’.’
12th March 2019

‘Thank you very much for the beautiful Slightly Foxed edition of BB’s Brendon Chase. . .’

‘Thank you very much for the beautiful Slightly Foxed edition of BB’s Brendon Chase, which arrived safely last Saturday. It is a wonderful book - certainly ‘a very good read’. Thank you and all at Slightly Foxed for the marvelous periodical and other publications published and sold by you – I enjoy them.’
- M.H. Phillips, Aberyswyth
From readers
11th March 2019

‘I am rarely moved to write about such matters. But . . . ’

‘I am rarely moved to write about such matters.  But as a first-year subscriber to Slightly Foxed I have come to appreciate greatly the quarterly magazine, which reveals pleasures I would almost certainly have missed otherwise.  The winter issue introduced me to two delights: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Lionel Davidson’s Kolymsky Heights, both of which I have since enjoyed immensely. So thank you for your introduction to them.  They have each, in their different ways, been revelatory.’
- S. Lamport, London
From readers
11th March 2019

‘I wish I were a millionaire . . . ’

‘I wish I were a millionaire – I would buy subscriptions for all my friends! One of the great delights of Slightly Foxed is the high production values you exert-paper, printing, magnificent illustrations.  It always gives me a thrill of pleasure when each issue arrives-such a beautiful object in a world of plastic and IT!’
- T. Love-Taylor, London
From readers
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 . . .
2nd March 2019

‘I have received my Spring issue and read it from cover to cover . . . ’

‘I have received my Spring issue and read it from cover to cover in one sitting! Pure unadulterated pleasure. From that I moved on to one of my purchases Hand-Grenade Practice in Peking, finishing it in a day! What an amazing insight into a foreign student’s life in China in 1975. The book had just the right balance of detail and humour. Such an easy but enriching read. I have moved on to Giving up the Ghost and am thoroughly absorbed in it.’
- T. Patton, Co. Antrim
From readers
A Leap into the Light

A Leap into the Light

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.)
Unsung Heroes

Unsung Heroes

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.
SF magazine subscribers only

In the Eye of the Storm

In Hazard is an extraordinary read. It resembles The Human Predicament in mixing fiction with fact, but here the ‘fact’ is not a devastating political movement which took years to grow, but a devastating meteorological event which took place within a week. In November 1932 the steamship Phemius was sucked into a Caribbean hurricane and tested to the limits, yet somehow she and all her crew survived. The owner of the shipping line to which Phemius belonged approached Hughes and suggested he record the dramatic story. Hughes agreed to describe the storm and its effects on the ship as accurately as he could, with the proviso that he would invent a fictitious captain and crew . . .
SF magazine subscribers only
The Hunt for Hitler

The Hunt for Hitler

I cannot now remember when I first read Hugh Trevor-Roper’s The Last Days of Hitler (1947). My memory is confused by the fact that I knew the author in old age and was to become his biographer; Trevor-Roper himself told me about the extraordinary circumstances in which he had come to write the book. In September 1945 he had been awaiting discharge from the army so that he could resume his pre-war role as an Oxford don, when he was asked to undertake an urgent investigation into the fate of the Führer.
SF magazine subscribers only

Striking Sparks

As Muriel Spark had done before me I insisted that ‘if you’re a driver, you drive’ – that I would publish what I liked, and that the lady who wrote from the South of France complaining that the contents of the magazine were ‘sheer drivel that is an insult to the intelligence’ must simply be ignored. I clung on for five years, introducing a number of then young poets now celebrated. I can scarcely believe that I did all that work without a salary – editors of the magazine had never been paid, and I didn’t learn until years later that on my appointment the Arts Council had a grant of £500 a year for the Editor, linked to £1,000 for the General Secretary – conditional on the secretary not being Robert Armstrong. The offer was naturally refused. I was awarded a small ‘honorarium’ for the last two years – less than I could have earned by writing one sixty-minute radio feature.
SF magazine subscribers only
Just Staying

Just Staying

In forty years MacLeod produced just sixteen short stories, later collected in Island (2002), and one not very long novel, the extraordinary No Great Mischief (1999). Notoriously, he wrote at glacial speed, toiling over each sentence by hand until its shape and heft and tune were exactly so. You could read the life’s work in a weekend, but you mustn’t: the stories demand to be savoured slowly, the way they were written. A MacLeod sentence is a tactile thing, with the hard but polished feel of a pebble in the hand. Yet the prose is not ‘writerly’ in any tiresome way: ‘I like to think that I am telling a story rather than writing it,’ MacLeod once said, and his work retains a strong sense of the speaking or even singing voice – of folk tales or Gaelic balladry.
SF magazine subscribers only

Oh Nancy, Nancy!

The Nancy Drew mysteries (I didn’t know, then, that ‘mystery’ is what Americans call a detective story) were the first series of books to which I became completely addicted. And, since there were dozens of them, it seemed as if I could never run out – useful, for a child who weekly exhausted his borrowing limit at Dorking Library. My grandfather got into the habit, for a bit, of buying me one a week. Whenever I had a book token, it was into the bookshop at the top of the main street (I can’t for the life of me remember its name) that I would go. Oh! the anticipation of a fresh one, a fresh mystery, smelling of new paperback, picked off the long shelf of Nancy Drew books in the children’s section and taken home in a crisp paper bag.
SF magazine subscribers only

An Unusual Lexicographer

The Spoken Word, published in 1981, was produced in response to a wave of complaints to the British Broadcasting Corporation about falling standards in spoken English. A new era of broadcasting had begun in the 1970s, as the BBC changed from being the Reithian home of ‘received pronunciation’ to something broader, permitting more regional accents and informal language. Many people felt that the move towards linguistic diversity had gone too far, resulting in what the critic Anne Karpf so eloquently described in 1980 as ‘English as she is murdered on radio’.
SF magazine subscribers only

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