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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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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.
SF magazine subscribers only
1st September 2012

Slightly Foxed Issue 35: From the Editors

One of the most enjoyable things we do at Slightly Foxed – and there are many – is the commissioning of our covers. People often say they wish they could have reproductions of them, and so, in the spring, Alarys did some research, and we went off to visit a couple of small, environmentally friendly firms. One, in Lincolnshire, has now produced a lovely Slightly Foxed tea-towel for us in hard-wearing unbleached cotton decorated with one of our most cheerful spring covers, and the other, in Berkshire, a mixed pack of four fine-quality cards of the most popular ones – two with a spring and summer and two with a winter theme.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
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.
SF magazine subscribers only

A Cheerful Revolutionary

Alexander Herzen was a nineteenth-century Russian political reformer and philosopher who wrote five volumes of what he described as ‘memoirs in progress’. Alexander Herzen was a nineteenth-century Russian political reformer and philosopher who wrote five volumes of what he described as ‘memoirs in progress’. These are the opening lines of Childhood, Youth and Exile – the first two volumes of the sequence My Past and Thoughts – which covers his early years, 1812 to 1840. The other three volumes carry on from there and end around 1868.
SF magazine subscribers only

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.
SF magazine subscribers only
Angling for a Bit of Peace

Angling for a Bit of Peace

Arthur Ransome was a great admirer of Hazlitt and hankered after producing a series of essays himself. He would probably have considered that his journalism got in the way of that ambition, but in Rod & Line he realized it. The book comprises fifty essays distilled from articles he wrote for the Manchester Guardian after having complained to the editor that the newspaper ‘was not doing what it might for fishermen’. That might put off those readers who are not among the four million anglers in Britain. It shouldn’t. Ransome was not a narrow-minded devotee of fly, float and lure but a man of wide interests and experience.
SF magazine subscribers only

Lost Cities

Between 1839 and 1841 John Lloyd Stephens made two long and arduous trips through Central America in search of lost Mayan cities. What followed were two huge books (respectively 900 and 700 pages long), both best-sellers in their day. Even now Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan and Incidents of Travel in Yucatan are a splendid introduction to the Mayan world, since except for a few of the most famous sites, the ruins they describe remain as remote and untouched as they were 150 years ago. I have never been to Chinese Turkestan or to Egypt, worse luck, but from my own experience (far less extensive than his) I can testify that Stephens has got Central America and its lost cities dead right, in all their complexity, discomfort and absolute fascination. He claims to have explored no less than forty-four sites, many for the first time.
SF magazine subscribers only

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