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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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In Love with the League

In Love with the League

I once had what I thought was a pretty good idea for a spy novel set in the 1920s. The hero would be a shell-shocked war veteran who winds up in a clinic in Switzerland being psychoanalysed by someone vaguely like Carl Jung. A fellow patient is an attractive woman working for the brand-new League of Nations in Geneva and, as they start an affair, he discovers she – and the League – possess a secret on which the future of world peace hinges . . . I was vague on the details.
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See also Tortoise

See also Tortoise

‘It’s like Pokémon,’ said my husband Andy, standing in the cool of a church in San Gimignano on our very hot honeymoon. And yes, I suppose saint-spotting is a bit like Pokémon, the creature-collecting game invented by Nintendo in the Nineties. Slogan: ‘Gotta catch ’em all.’ We weren’t hunting for Pikachus or Bulbasaurs, but for St Catherines and St Antony Abbots in fresco cycles and altarpiece panels. Catherine you’ll know by her wheel, instrument of her martyrdom, St Antony by his bell and his pig. A friend speaks fondly of childhood holidays with his church-crawling parents. He and his twin sister would be sent off to play saintly bingo. Could they find a St John the Baptist (lamb and sheepskin gilet), a Mary Magdalene (jar of unguent), an Apollonia (tooth and pincers)? Off they would go round cloisters, into side-chapels, standing on tiptoe for a better look at stained-glass windows. As with Pokémon, they knew their saints by their markers. Gotta catch ’em all.
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Hooked on Fish

Hooked on Fish

Because they live on an island laced with rivers, ponds and streams, the British are obsessive anglers. Fishermen – and most of them are men – make up a large but secretive society cut off from the rest of us by strange language, obscure controversies and complex motives. Most books about angling are written for specialists: coarse fishers, fly-fishers, sea-fishers. But in Blood Knots (2010) Luke Jennings has broken with convention and employed his great gift for words to explain to baffled outsiders what angling is really about. This is a memoir written for everyone.
A Familiar Country

A Familiar Country

In a cardboard box I put the essential objects we would need in our rented cottage, until we got the keys to our new house in Norfolk: my infant daughter’s stuffed monkey, some paperwork, Cash’s name tapes for the boys’ new schools and the books we were reading at bedtime – Five on a Treasure Island for the boys, and for me my mother’s tatty copy of The Go-Between, a still of Julie Christie from the film on the cover, which would date it to around 1971.
SF magazine subscribers only
4th September 2023

Join the Slightly Foxed team | Work Experience, Internships & Vacancies

Slightly Foxed Ltd is looking for an experienced and enthusiastic Operations and Subscriptions Manager to join their London office. The Operations and Subscriptions Manager will be responsible for the day-to-day running of the office and management of junior staff. They will oversee the office and other operational aspects of the magazine including the management and dispatch of subscriptions and books and merchandise and be responsible for the subscriptions renewal and marketing inserts programmes, among other things. Other key elements of this role will include data analysis, seeking and implementing opportunities for partnerships and other initiatives to increase subscriptions and assisting with the planning and development of direct marketing projects.
From the editors
‘She was a most remarkable woman . . .’ | Slightly Foxed gift ideas

‘She was a most remarkable woman . . .’ | Slightly Foxed gift ideas

As Mothering Sunday approaches in the UK and Ireland (those of you in the rest of the world have a little more time!), we thought some of you may appreciate a few bookish gift ideas for the ‘most remarkable’ women in your lives, be they mother or grandmother figures – or any fellow booklover or, indeed, yourself! All items can be wrapped in handsome brown paper, tied up with our cream ribbon and sent directly to recipient, or to you to hand over in person. If you’re worried about delivery times, or if you’re cutting it a little fine when placing your order, you can choose to have an instant gift card sent to you by email or directly to the recipient.
Period Piece | Chapter VII: ‘Aunt Etty’

Period Piece | Chapter VII: ‘Aunt Etty’

I have defined Ladies as people who did not do things themselves. Aunt Etty was most emphatically such a person. She told me, when she was eighty-six, that she had never made a pot of tea in her life; and that she had never in all her days been out in the dark alone, not even in a cab; and I don’t believe she had ever travelled by train without a maid. She certainly always took her maid with her when she went in a fly to the dentist’s. She asked me once to give her a bit of the dark meat of a chicken, because she had never tasted anything but the breast. I am sure that she had never sewn on a button, and I should guess that she had hardly ever even posted a letter herself. There were always people to do these things for her. In fact, in some ways, she was very like a royal person. Once she wrote when her maid, the patient and faithful Janet, was away for a day or two: ‘I am very busy answering my own bell.’ And I can well believe it, for Janet’s work was no sinecure. But, of course, while Janet was away, the housemaid was doing all the real work; and Aunt Etty was only perhaps finding the postage stamps for herself, or putting on her own shawl – the sort of things she rang for Janet to do every five minutes all day long.
The books that turned us into readers | Celebrating World Book Day 2023

The books that turned us into readers | Celebrating World Book Day 2023

Greetings, dear readers, from Hoxton Square. Today marks World Book Day here in the UK and in Ireland. World Book Day encourages children to read for pleasure, and develop a love of books and reading. The charity offers every child and young person the opportunity to have a book of their own. Over the past 26 years, World Book Day has inspired a life-long habit of reading in children in the UK and Ireland – and, indeed, around the world – a truly noble endeavour.

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