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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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16th January 2015

‘Keep up the good work. . .’ C. O’Dell, Cork

‘Thank you for the latest Edition, I am very pleased that you have included Gerry Durrell’s book in your series. I was cameraman on several of Gerry and Lee’s TV documentary series and got to know them well. They were both great company and fun to work with, and I visited them at the zoo in Jersey several times. I’m enclosing a copy of the flyleaf of one of their books, with the appropriate inscription - the grocer’s apostrophe is a bit of a worry, though! Keep up the good work.’
- C. O'Dell, Cork
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Shiny New Books

An entirely independent recommendations online magazine. Shiny New Books is what happens when you put four book bloggers in a virtual room and let them give in to wish fulfillment. www.shinynewbooks.co.uk

Aunt Freda Opens a Door

One day in the late 1980s I had a call from my Aunt Freda. It came completely out of the blue, for although Freda had been my favourite godmother throughout my childhood, I had hardly exchanged a word with her – save the odd Christmas card – for what must have been twenty years. The purpose of her call was to tell me she had a box of books to give me and would I like to pick them up from my parents’ house in Sheffield, where she would drop them off on her next visit. ‘There’s a complete Shakespeare, Churchill’s Island Race and an encyclopaedia,’ she said by way of brief explanation.
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O’Brian’s World

O’Brian’s mastery of language is most wonderful of all. He manages to capture that mixture of toughness and grace which, for me at least, makes formal eighteenth-century English so attractive. Also the verbal violence that makes demotic eighteenth-century English so vivid. He catches Stephen’s subtle Irishness, or the slightly unidiomatic English of highly educated South Americans, or the competitiveness of children, or the way one wife can make her opinion of another very clear without expressing it, or Jack can make his authority absolute without disrespect – and he does it all in the language of the time.
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My Grandfather and Mr Standfast

My Grandfather and Mr Standfast

In the hope that there might be other, more nuanced narratives, I have set myself the goal of reading widely about the war: recent histories, of course, but also those books written during it or soon after its end, since they more truly encapsulate the thoughts of those who went through it all. This naturally means the war poetry as well as the prose works of Sassoon, Graves and Blunden, but alsoMr Standfast, my grandfather John Buchan’s third Richard Hannay story, and his four-volume History of the Great War.
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All in the Mind?

I have long wanted to offer an update on the latest additions to the Crowden Archive. Some subscribers may recall the first piece on the subject, ‘Something for the Weekend’ in Slightly Foxed No. 32. In it, I described a selection of the titles in my possession which have been collected over more than thirty years and which appeal to those possessed of a Lower Fourth Form sense of humour. My mother feels that I should now move on to more suitable pastimes, pokerwork, perhaps, or tatting, but books with questionable titles just keep on falling into my hands.
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An Elevated Lifestyle

An Elevated Lifestyle

The amazing thing about Nero Wolfe, hero of Rex Stout’s Fer-de-Lance, was that he lived in a house with its own elevator. I was 14 when I first read the book. I was spending the school holidays with my mother and brand-new stepfather, who were then living on an oil pumping station in Iraq with the evocative Babylonian name of K3. The British expatriate staff lived in prefabricated bungalows assembled in various configurations to give the illusion of variety. These were commodious, well-planned and, when the air conditioning worked, comfortable, but characterless. And here was a private detective who lived in an enormous townhouse with its own passenger lift.
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Inside the Inside Man

Inside Europe, Inside USA, Inside Russia . . . if journalism is the first draft of history, John Gunther’s journalistic documentary works are indisputably dated – his last, Inside Australia, had to be co-authored and was published in 1972, two years after his death. The books are time-capsules: all the world leaders and political figures featured in the Inside series – and they focus primarily on leaders and politicians – are long gone. Gunther’s style, however, is still most vividly alive. He was first and foremost a reporter, and throughout his books an immediate journalistic active-case style dominates – short, punchy sentences such as ‘Hitler rants. He orates. He seldom answers questions.’ And: ‘If Stalin has nerves, they are veins in rock.’
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