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Where Past and Present Meet

Where Past and Present Meet

Lucy Boston’s The Children of Green Knowe (1954) is one of the most enchanting children’s books ever written, set in the perfect time and place. The time is unspecified, but it would seem to be after the war, when trains still stopped at little stations like the one called Penny Soaky. It’s not long before Christmas and there will be snow. It is also a time when a little boy like Tolly, who is 7, can travel on a train to his unknown great-grandmother all by himself.
SF magazine subscribers only
Scenes from Parish Life

Scenes from Parish Life

Some twenty years ago, inspired by the hymns and sacred music she’d sung at school and in a Cambridge chapel choir, Ysenda Maxtone Graham set out to explore the life of the Church of England. Sustained by British Rail sandwiches and mugs of vicarage tea, she spent a year travelling the country, listening to the views of High Church bishops and newly ordained curates. She talked to believers and unbelievers in their congregations, absorbed the beauty and ancient liturgy of cathedral Eucharist and evensong, and the fervency of born-again evangelical gatherings.
SF magazine subscribers only
1st September 2025

Slightly Foxed Issue 87: From the Editors

The Slightly Foxed office is always busy but there’s something about the arrival of autumn – brisker air, shorter days, everyone back together again after the summer holidays – that brings a burst of extra energy with it. As always at this time of year, we’re finalizing arrangements for Readers’ Day, which is on 8 November at our usual Bloomsbury meeting place, the Art Workers’ Guild in Queen Square. For those who haven’t yet experienced it, it’s always a jolly occasion, winding up with cake and a convivial glass of Madeira. This year we have a great line-up, including Tim Kendall on his edition of the letters between William Golding and his editor at Faber, Charles Monteith; Sarah Anderson and Martin Latham on the art of book selling; Maggie Fergusson on the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins; and Catherine Coldstream on her much praised memoir Cloistered, an account of the years she spent as a nun in an enclosed Carmelite order. We still have a few tickets left, so if you’re interested, do get in touch as soon as possible.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
Extract from Life in Our Hands | Chapter 2: Relief and Reflection

Extract from Life in Our Hands | Chapter 2: Relief and Reflection

It was good to lie in bed stretching my legs against the rough blankets, aloof from the rattle and prattle of the unit beginning a new day. I watched Tait washing a pair of socks in the portable washbasin. Scottie was already asleep, her two dark plaits falling over the edge of the low camp bed on to some crushed yellow trefoil and her underclothes lying like a pool on the grass floor of the tent. Her shirt and trousers were carelessly thrown on to the only canvas stool where lay a copy of the unit’s ‘daily orders’ and unopened letters.
Terror among the Wheatfields

Terror among the Wheatfields

When the BBC asked me to make a radio programme about Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966), I had not yet read it, and didn’t want to. I’d mentally filed it in the same category as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and American Psycho: books that I might have liked in my teens and twenties but that now seemed insufferably macho. I’d not that long ago had a baby and I had no interest in reading about a family being murdered in their beds.
SF magazine subscribers only
Hungry for Love

Hungry for Love

The past is a foreign country: they eat things differently there. At a picnic, for example, they might decant a tin of slimy boiled ham on to a dinner plate and eat it with a knife and fork, along with Heinz Salad Cream served in a sauce boat. They consume jelly with evaporated milk, cucumber slices in vinegar, plates of reformed cow’s tongue – and on special occasions they might serve them all at once on a wheeled trolley. Instead of vegetables they buy instant dried peas in cardboard boxes. They grill grapefruits. They’ve never heard of hummus.
Toast | *New* from the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

Toast | *New* from the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

Introducing the forthcoming addition to the Slightly Foxed Editions list, No. 71: Nigel Slater | TOAST Nigel Slater, OBE, is perhaps Britain’s most treasured food writer, loved by cooks the nation over for his comfortingly do-able recipes and his colourful writing, the companionable tone of his bestselling cookbooks and his longstanding column in the Observer. In his funny and poignant memoir Toast he describes the ingredients that combined to make him the cookery writer he is today – a childhood that certainly had very little that was comfortable about it.
At Home With Mrs Thrale

At Home With Mrs Thrale

For those of us who cannot get enough of the Georgians, Hester Lynch Salusbury, who became Mrs Thrale and later Mrs Piozzi, is indispensable. At a time when Samuel Johnson was the greatest planet in the emerging literary firmament, she was one of his most important satellites, in fact more than that: a prop and stay without whom he might well have foundered. When they came to characterize themselves however, they were less portentous: Johnson was an elephant to Mrs Thrale’s rattlesnake. With his trunk he could ‘lift up a buffalo or pick up a pin’, she said, while he claimed, ‘Many have felt your venom, few have escaped your attractions and all the world knows you have the rattle.’ This last is a reference to her delight in conversation and her skill at maintaining its flow, what Johnson called her ‘stream of sentiment enlightened by gaiety’.
SF magazine subscribers only
‘Your editions are a joy to handle and have given me many happy hours.’ | Slightly Foxed Editions

‘Your editions are a joy to handle and have given me many happy hours.’ | Slightly Foxed Editions

Greetings from a busy, book-filled Slightly Foxed office, where we’re merrily navigating our way through an obstacle course of post bags, packing materials and parcels. There’s still time for us to help with gifts for booklovers, and we’d like to shine a light on our Slightly Foxed Editions – beautifully produced cloth-bound hardbacks, just the right size to hold in the hand and with a ribbon marker to keep your place.
Endless hours of pleasure | New this Winter from Slightly Foxed

Endless hours of pleasure | New this Winter from Slightly Foxed

Greetings, dear readers, from Hoxton Square. We’re delighted to report that the new winter issue of Slightly Foxed has now left the printing press at Smith Settle and should arrive with readers in the UK in the coming days, and elsewhere around the world over the next few weeks. We do hope it brings much reading pleasure. And for those of you who are on a repeat order to receive our new limited-edition memoir each quarter, your usual hand-numbered copy of Diary of a Provincial Lady by E. M. Delafield will be with you very soon.
Diary of a Provincial Lady | *New* from the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

Diary of a Provincial Lady | *New* from the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

We’re in the drawing-room of an under-heated middle-class home, far from any city, on a chilly November day in 1929 and our diarist – the Provincial Lady of the title – is dealing with a bossy acquaintance. Lady Boxe, her neighbour from the local great house, is one of a cast of headache-inducing characters who inhabit this deathless diary, including Ethel the clumsy house-parlourmaid, and Cook, who has just announced that ‘something is wrong with the range’, the PL’s husband, unemotional and uncommunicative Robert, and her children, runny-nosed 6-year-old Vicky and 10-year-old Robin, home briefly from his prep-school and bringing a friend who is eating them out of house and home.

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