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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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How We Lived Then

When I look back at the food of my 1970s childhood, it all seems as brightly coloured as a pair of toe-socks or a brand new Space Hopper. It was a neon feast of packets and powders, stuff dehydrated, canned or frozen solid. A typical supper was Alphabetti Spaghetti and fish fingers accompanied by the happy glug of tomato ketchup; then a pudding of butterscotch Angel Delight (just add milk) with a squeeze from a tube of chocolate-flavoured sauce. Flavours were fantastical combinations of chemicals and ideas (remember ‘hedgehog’ crisps?).

SF magazine subscribers only

A Gentleman on the Case

What do you feel like reading, curled up in your armchair? Obviously, a whodunnit. But not just any old whodunnit. You don’t want the colourless style and arid tricksiness of Agatha Christie, nor the stately prose and rampant snobbery of Dorothy L. Sayers. You want the real queen of crime, the best, the darkest, the most interesting, idiosyncratic and literary novelist that the Golden Age of detective fiction produced. I refer, of course, to Margery Allingham.

That Essex Boy

‘The natural pleasure of reading it is enormous,’ wrote Maynard Keynes to his friend Lytton Strachey on coming to the end of Elizabeth and Essex. ‘You seem, on the whole, to imagine yourself as Elizabeth, but I see from the pictures that it is Essex whom you have got up as yourself. But I expect you have managed to get the best of both worlds.’

SF magazine subscribers only

Bookshop of the Quarter: Winter 2015

The Barnes Bookshop is one of three independent bookshops owned by Isla Dawes, with the others located in Kew and Sheen, who has worked in the book industry for twenty years. Here she tells us more about the Barnes branch, recalls her life in books and recommends some gems in time for Christmas . . .

‘Is there any news of the iceberg?’

Alan Coren was on fire. Or, at least, smoking. He was also ablaze with enthusiasm. In due course, the cigarette was extinguished. The enthusiasm was not. It was 2004 and he had come to see the archives of Punch, which the British Library had just acquired. Coren had worked on the magazine since the early 1960s and been its editor between 1978 and 1987. After he left, it went into a terminal decline, ceasing publication in April 1992. The title was eventually purchased by Mohamed Al Fayed and relaunched in 1996 but finally sank in 2002.

SF magazine subscribers only

1st March 2012

Slightly Foxed Issue 33: From the Editors

Now the year has turned and spring bulbs are bravely poking up in Clerkenwell window-boxes, we’re looking forward hopefully, as well as looking back thoughtfully over the events of the past year, which was quite an adventurous one for SF.

- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

From the editors

Dear Dodie

Dodie Smith said she never felt ‘quite grown-up’. This may sound like an excuse for tiresome behaviour, but Dodie did retain all her life a childlike charm, being under five feet tall with a high-pitched girlish voice. She was an only child, a singularly precocious, egocentric and thoroughly original one.

Goings-on in the Garden of Eden

My father’s two favourite books, which he seemed to reread almost annually, were Dickens’s Pickwick Papers, and Uncle Fred in the Springtime, by P. G. Wodehouse. Both are distinguished by complexity of plot, an array of eccentric characters and prodigious comic invention. And both are very funny.

The Library in Knightsbridge

Forty or so years ago, Harrods was still a place of considerable eccentricity. The Lending Library, with its attached Secondhand Book Department, hardly fitted with the high mark-up merchandise in the rest of this gargantuan store. However, the Harrods mantra that it could supply anything from a pin to an elephant allowed for the existence of the Library until its demise, in much reduced form, in 1989.

SF magazine subscribers only

At Home with the Pewters

I’m bound to admit that some of the experiences, and also, for heavens’ sake, the attitudes of the ‘pathetic ass who records his trivial life’ (as William Emrys Williams put it in his introduction to the Penguin edition of 1945), seem embarrassingly close to my own. Mr Pooter may have lived more than a hundred years ago – just up the road from where I live now, as it happens, in a house, er, rather similar to mine – but his psychology is timeless.

SF magazine subscribers only

13th June 2016

‘Strike a blow for good reading everywhere . . .’

‘Slightly Foxed offers a chance to discover about eighty books a year that most of us have never heard of but all of us will wonder about. Strike a blow for good reading everywhere and order a sample issue. It’s all about books, really good books . . . I couldn’t be happier to have found this magazine’

- Bookslut

From readers

3rd November 2016

Country Life Book of the Week

This vivid study of life at girls’ boarding schools between 1939 and 1979 is both hilarious and poignant, finds Maggie Fergusson. Women who have been to boarding schools,’ writes Ysenda Maxtone Graham, ‘live with flashbacks both joyous and nightmarish.’ reading…

- Country Life

From the press

2nd November 2016

Birth of a Book

From the press

A Matter of Dedication

Before this book-signing craze gets completely out of hand, we must establish some rules. After all, what may be considered correct in Waterstone’s could be frowned upon in Hatchards and be beyond the pale in Hay-on-Wye. Is it ever acceptable to ask an author to sign another author’s book? Fountain pen or ballpoint? What if the author mis-spells the recipient’s name? These are some of the questions I intend to tackle.

SF magazine subscribers only

30th October 2016

How it feels to survive . . . boarding school

The Sunday Times Magazine
Ysenda Maxtone Graham recalls the appalling food, cold dorms and stern matrons of her all-girls boarding school in the 1970s - and says it did her the world of good . . .

- Ysenda Maxtone Graham

From the press

Slightly Foxed Subscriber Offer Codes

EXISTING SUBSCRIBERS, PLEASE CLICK HERE TO VIEW A FULL LIST OF OFFERS FROM OUR PARTNERS. NB YOU WILL NEED TO LOG IN TO VIEW THE CODES.

SF magazine subscribers only