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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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Joie de Vivre

Joie de Vivre

Idle speculation, of course, but occasionally I’ve fantasized that the great historian Richard Cobb and I chanced to be sitting together on a tram in Toulouse in 1946, when I was 4 and he was in his late twenties and just about to be demobbed. He’d have been on his way to visit a young woman he’d met at the British Fortnight organized in the city by the British Council. I’d have been riding the tram for the thrill of it, in the care of its conductress, who was a lodger in my maternal grandparents’ boarding-house behind Place du Capitole, as were my mother, sister, newly born brother and I, dispatched from England for a few months while my father, no longer able to support us properly, looked for a permanent teaching post.
SF magazine subscribers only
The Noblest Profession

The Noblest Profession

Helen McGill has a problem. A self-described ageing spinster – she is, good heavens, approaching forty – Helen is feeling unappreciated by the Sage of Redfield, her brother Andrew, whose books about life on the farm and the virtues of pastoral living have made him a literary celebrity – and to Helen’s thinking, very much at her expense. For it is Helen who bakes the bread and collects the eggs and cooks the meals on her wood-fired stove and cleans the house and darns the socks so that the Sage may amble down country roads and come home to lean on his fence, light his pipe and think big thoughts. Then, having handed his sister his dirty laundry, the Sage will retire to his study, warm and well-fed, to spin yarns about his adventures in ‘the bosom of Nature’ and reflect on the Simple Life. When Roger Mifflin, a caravan-driving itinerant bookseller, appears at her door hoping to meet the great man, who yet again has wandered off on ‘some vagabond jaunt to collect adventures for a new book’ and left Helen to run the farm, Helen decides she has had enough.
SF magazine subscribers only
Best of British

Best of British

Most books are confined to the straitjacket of their own generation, shackled and bonded to those who first bought them, read them, loved them and spread the word. It is a rare book that transcends its own time: a four-leaf clover, a repentant politician, a virgin queen. But I like to think that P. R. Reid’s three books on the Colditz prisoner-of-war camp, devoured by those of us who rejoice in being baby-boomers, will still be read by future generations.
SF magazine subscribers only
Laying It on with a Trowel

Laying It on with a Trowel

In the early 1920s Axel Munthe, the renowned physician born in Sweden in 1857, was going blind. Shrinking from the glare of the sun he retired to a dark tower and taught himself to use a typewriter. Henry James had suggested he write a memoir – it might cheer him up. Munthe was surprised when The Story of San Michele (1929) became an international bestseller and rightly predicted that in a hundred years’ time nobody would have heard of it. This neglected but altogether thrilling life story was a gift from an Argentine friend of mine, her favourite book, she said. ‘When people ask “Who is Axel Munthe?” I reply with a slight air of reproach, “Well, they’ve heard of him in Buenos Aires . . .”’
SF magazine subscribers only
The Sound of a Leaf

The Sound of a Leaf

In lateish middle age we sold our house in Devon and moved to France, planning a new project in a new place. Living in a caravan for a year while we renovated, we vastly improved our French (words for ‘beam’, ‘wheelbarrow’ and ‘high blood pressure’ proving useful) and only one of us was ever homesick. For some reason I’d taken with me Ronald Blythe’s Outsiders: A Book of Garden Friends (2008) and, although on balance I was enjoying living in France, this did make me slightly wistful. It’s a collection of his essays on gardeners, gardening, botanists, plantsmen, great gardens, garden memories, writers’ gardens, the seasons. To anyone even mildly interested in gardening it’s a collection of treasures.
SF magazine subscribers only
The Agony and the Ecstasy

The Agony and the Ecstasy

Half a century after it was first published in 1973, Portrait of a Marriage still delivers a powerful depth charge, still intrigues and amazes in equal measure. The story it tells, of a marriage made all the stronger by the centrifugal forces of bisexual love affairs forcing it apart, is profoundly moving, and in Nigel Nicolson’s graceful telling, as relevant now as ever. We live in an age of soundbites, where complex lives are often reduced to simplistic labels – Vita Sackville-West? Ah, yes, the gardener, the lover of Virginia Woolf, the inspiration for Orlando – and need to be reminded of the fire and passion, the agony and ecstasy, that combined in the making of two such singular lives and one such singular marriage.
Cover Artist: Slightly Foxed Issue 71, Jackie Morris, ‘Spring into Autumn’

Cover Artist: Slightly Foxed Issue 71, Jackie Morris, ‘Spring into Autumn’

Jackie Morris, born in 1961, grew up with a desire to paint. She studied art at Bath Academy of Art and has exhibited her work internationally. She is the illustrator of many books and the author of some. In 2019 The Lost Words, a book made in collaboration with Robert Macfarlane, won the Greenaway Medal. Her inspiration is found between the feathers of a raven’s wing in flight, in the voices of birds, the turning of the year and the shape of a fox. Books, art, paint, creativity, poetry, the remnant boxes of antique paints, all these things and more are an inspiration. She also has a passion for old typewriters, the songs they sing and their scent.

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