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

Popular categories

Explore our library

One more day of clear, if frozen, sun | A Countryman’s Spring Notebook Extract

One more day of clear, if frozen, sun | A Countryman’s Spring Notebook Extract

The yew tree appeared as wafers of snow to our waking eyes, when March dawned. The rest of it was lost in darkness. The prospect of March is usually (as Johnson said of a friend’s second marriage) ‘the triumph of hope over experience’. A visitor brought us some daffodils that had been raised under glass: ‘daffodils that take the winds of March with beauty’. Although these had never felt a breath of wind, they seemed to create a magic breeze about them, by their petals flung back from their jag-edged trumpets. Their perfume filled the room with spring, after our winter of scentless maidenhair and helichrysum.
Dorothy: The Highlights

Dorothy: The Highlights

It’s always risky to buy a second-hand book online, especially when the condition is described as ‘fair’, which embraces a wide variety of possible faults. When Dorothy Wordsworth’s Continental Journals, 1798–1820 (1897) arrived, a quick flick through revealed that the text on many pages had been made hideous by vivid green highlighting. This was annoying but not sufficiently so to make me return the book. In fact I’ve found that annotations can sometimes add to one’s enjoyment, as in the case of a copy of George Borrow’s Lavengro, chosen from the library of an old friend who had recently died. Reading the pencilled annotations in his familiar hand, it was as if I was reading it alongside him, enjoying again his questioning mind and gentle intelligence, bringing him back to life for me for a few hours.
SF magazine subscribers only
How to Marry an Earl

How to Marry an Earl

As a little girl I used to hate flying because it hurt my ears. And when I say hurt, I mean it felt as if someone was trying to drill right through them. This was unfortunate, since we regularly flew to Germany to visit family every Christmas, and often over Easter or the summer too. Of course I tried all the usual remedies – chewing gum; sucking mints; swallowing then yawning; yawning then swallowing. But as with most aches and pains, nothing worked half as well as a good book. And the book I remember working best was Eva Ibbotson’s A Countess below Stairs (1981, later reissued as The Secret Countess).
SF magazine subscribers only
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

Sign up to our e-newsletter

Sign up for dispatches about new issues, books and podcast episodes, highlights from the archive, events, special offers and giveaways.