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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17th August 2015

‘It will remind you of what it really means to be a reader . . .’

‘What makes Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly so great? As I perused the latest issue, I realized that in many ways it’s exactly what I wish my blog to be, and what I appreciate about other blogs. Each issue contains around a dozen and a half essays in which readers of many stripes celebrate books that have moved, enlightened, impressed, or astonished them. The selection of titles is wonderfully eclectic, blithely leaping over barriers of genre, subject matter, language, geography, target age, and publication date . . .
- The Emerald City Book Review
From readers
14th August 2015

‘Quarterlies that may make you begin to drop names like Thucydides and Thoreau with aplomb . . .’

We were already delighted when the McLean & Eakin bookshop in Petoskey, Michigan started stocking Slightly Foxed and now, with this glowing recommendation from bookseller Julie, we’re even happier!
‘S.F. is published in the U.K. It is of the perfect size for reading in a cramped fisherman’s tent, train or a comfortably squashy bed. The lay-out is stylish and the small magazine has a lovely tactile quality. The illustrations are wonderfully clever . .
From readers

Nicholas Carey

New this autumn in the Slightly Foxed Cubs series. It is 1853, and on holiday in Italy, Captain Nicholas Carey is persuaded by his impulsive cousin Andrew to help three Italian revolutionaries avoid capture and escape the Papal States. After returning to England, Nicholas runs his cousin to earth in Paris, where he is still involved with the revolutionaries, and the two foil an assassination attempt on the Emperor, Napoleon III. 

McLean & Eakin

307 East Lake Street Petosky, MI 49770-9998 USA Tel: +1 2313471180 www.mcleanandeakin.com
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Mustapha’s Room

Mustapha’s Room

I had been book-starved for some years. It didn’t help that I was a literary snob and this was the pre-digital age. Earning a living by travelling around the world was extraordinary but I had forfeited good novels for this two-and-a-half-year experience. Sometimes I was lent books by clients but they weren’t always to my taste; I bought the odd second-hand novel from Aboudi’s bookshop in Luxor but they were hideously overpriced; and sometimes I was given a gem. Towards the end of my time in Egypt, another tour leader handed me Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible through a window of the departing Cairo-Aswan sleeper train with a shouted promise that I wouldn’t be able to put it down. She was right and I stayed up too late for several nights to finish this beautiful story of another part of Africa and overactive imaginations. Such finds were rare, sadly, and I ‘made do’, a state I didn’t much care for.
SF magazine subscribers only
Waugh on the Warpath

Waugh on the Warpath

Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One is not one of his ‘big name’ books. It doesn’t rank with, say, Scoop, Vile Bodies or Brideshead Revisited in the reading consciousness. I came across it only by dint of having a father who had read everything, usually as soon as it came out, and who had a first edition of the Penguin on his shelf. ‘If you like Decline and Fall,’ he would say, ‘you should read The Loved One,’ but for some reason I never did. Not until the other day, when it successfully got me through two dismal coach journeys. That is what Waugh specializes in, of course: a book to read which is like eating a longdrawn- out tea at Fortnum’s, but one you can leave and return to at your leisure – not that leaving it is all that easy.
SF magazine subscribers only

A Man and His Donkey

The name Platero in Spanish means ‘silversmith’ and is frequently given to grey-coloured donkeys. The relationship between Platero and the ‘I’ of the book is evoked with extraordinary tenderness. This book about a man and his donkey – an animal we humans often grant little dignity – is a love story of heartbreaking beauty and grace, a book about nature and our relationship with it, but also about imagination, the ‘clatter of fancy’ that enlivens our lives.
SF magazine subscribers only
In Search of the Biographer

In Search of the Biographer

The pioneering work in question, The Quest for Corvo (1934), was written by an author who published little else of note. It broke all the rules but established a literary sub-genre of its own by revealing the working of the biographer’s mind as he struggles to uncover and make sense of the scattered fragments of a life. This experimental work demonstrates how the image of any figure portrayed in a biography is not so much a photograph as a portrait in mosaic, reflecting within it something of the portraitist’s own personality and predispositions. As Julian Symons, the crime writer and brother of its author wrote, it blew the gaff on the genre ‘by refusing for a moment to make the customary pretence of detachment’.
SF magazine subscribers only

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