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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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The Book Cure

I wanted to call this ‘How Children’s Literature Saved My Life’, but the simple truth is that my life was never in any real danger. My imaginative life, however, was in grave peril. It hovered on the brink. This is the story of how it was resuscitated in the simplest of ways – by reading children’s books.

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Along the Old Ways

Along the Old Ways

I spend a couple of weeks each year walking on the Lake District fells, so it is inevitable that I should have fallen upon James Rebanks’s remarkable The Shepherd’s Life (2015). I loved it, and I learned much more about upland sheep farming than I could possibly have divined from hours of watching Herdwicks on the fell. Reading The Shepherd’s Life inevitably set me thinking about another book I read long ago and which, tellingly, turned the young Rebanks into a reader.

A Lesson in Living

Was any novelist – or journalist come to that – writing about breast cancer in the early 1960s? Did anyone – apart from the medical profession and a few bold souls – even talk about it? When I was growing up, the word ‘breast’ was usually only encountered in literature or hymns and was likely to summon a snigger; women and girls had ‘chests’. A mastectomy was considered almost a matter of shame. Astonishing, then, that John McGahern’s first novel, The Barracks, published in 1963, has Elizabeth Reegan’s breast cancer at its centre.

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Bloody Conquest

There is a temptation to approach Noël Mostert’s Frontiers (1993) circumspectly, as you would the Grand Canyon or the Great Pyramid of Giza. It’s monumental – 1,292 pages, not counting index and notes ‒ and frankly imposing, a doorstopper to stop the largest door. The story it tells is of vast proportions too. Do not, however, be unnerved. This is a book which for originality, historical depth and sheer narrative richness has been compared to Gibbon ‒ and it deserves the comparison. It also deserves a great many readers.

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Taking the Poet at His Word

Taking the Poet at His Word

When T. S. Eliot summed up his life’s work in 1963, two years before he died, it was in a Collected Poems of fewer than 250 pages. But when Christopher Ricks and I published The Poems of T. S. Eliot in 2015, the two volumes ran to some two thousand. Where did the other 1,750 pages come from? What is this new edition, and what does it mean to ‘edit’ poetry anyway?

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One Tree Books

Slightly Foxed subscribers will receive a 10% discount at One Tree Books, an independent bookshop in Petersfield, Hampshire . . . CLICK HERE TO FIND OUT MORE

The London Library

The London Library

Slightly Foxed subscribers will receive a 10% discount on membership to The London Library . . . CLICK HERE TO FIND OUT MORE

Time Out of War

Every now and then a book is so badly published that it never quite recovers, however eloquent its admirers. Robert Kee’s account of the three years he spent in a German prisoner-of-war camp is one of the great books of the Second World War; it is also sadly neglected, thanks to the part played in its publication by the novelist Graham Greene.

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Gladstone’s Library

Slightly Foxed subscribers will receive a 10% discount on accommodation at Gladstone's Library . . . CLICK HERE TO FIND OUT MORE

A Song of the Islands

A Song of the Islands

An Orkney Tapestry sits quietly at the heart of George Mackay Brown’s prolific output as a writer of poetry, stories, novels and plays, created over a life that was longer and richer than he or anyone else expected. (Following a diagnosis of TB as a young man, before the introduction of penicillin, he must have felt he was living on borrowed time for almost all his adult life.) For those who have never read him, this small book about his native Orkney serves as a wonderful introduction. For those who have already fallen under his spell, it is something they return to and quote from, and love like an old friend.

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Age of Innocence

Although the core of the story is set during the Second World War, the conflict barely registers beside what is, to the young hero, his raison d’être: the pursuit of an idealized lover. I must have been 16 when I first read it, and nothing I had come across described more perfectly my own state of mind. It clutched at my heart; returning to it in middle age, I found certain phrases and sentences echoing across the years with haunting vividness, like a bell tolling from a submerged city.

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Circus Tricks

I first read John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy soon after it was published in 1974, and have reread it several times since. It is one of those books that never fails to give me pleasure, even now I know it so well. There is so much about it to admire and enjoy: the precision of the dialogue, the deftly drawn characters, the accuracy of the settings, the steadily rising tension – above all, the sheer quality of the writing. Here is a writer in complete command of his subject: able to do whatever he wants, confident it will succeed.

Stage Lightning

I can’t remember which teacher told us to read his new book, ,The Way of the Actor (1986). But I can remember the sense of relief when I realized that, despite the icky subtitle – A New Path to Personal Knowledge and Power – it was written by a professor of psychology and had footnotes; this I understood. Bates’s ideas were intriguing. Using his own interviews with four leading actors – Charlton Heston, Glenda Jackson, Anthony Sher and Liv Ullmann – and excerpts from hundreds of other performers’ interviews and memoirs, he laid out a theory that actors were shamans for the modern world.

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Slightly Foxed at Chichester Literary Society

Slightly Foxed at Chichester Literary Society

Gail Pirkis and Hazel Wood, editors of Slightly Foxed, spoke at St George’s Church Hall on Friday 5 May as part of the Chichester Literary Society’s programme of talks and events.

Discounts on Books & Goods

Discounts on Books & Goods

As well as four printed issues each year, your subscription includes preferential prices for all books and goods listed here on our website . . . CLICK HERE TO FIND OUT MORE

The John Moore Museum

The John Moore Museum

Slightly Foxed subscribers receive 2-for-1 adult entry to the John Moore Museum and Old Baptist Chapel . . . CLICK HERE TO FIND OUT MORE

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