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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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Where the Blue Really Begins

In the summer of 1965, I hitchhiked with two school friends to Greece. We had just done our A levels, with mixed results. In Corfu, we all met our first boyfriends: likewise. What cast the real spell, over all of us nice Surrey girls, were the Greek islands. And the two books we read in those enchanted weeks offered the most intense marriage of literature and experience that I can remember.

SF magazine subscribers only

Fired by a Canon

This unlikely clergyman turned out to be an ideal biographical subject. But it took Pearson seven difficult years to find him and then write The Smith of Smiths. It was published in 1934 when he was in his early forties. He had discovered an occupation that would absorb him for the remaining thirty years of his life. The book was soundly based on fact rather than guesswork and contained many quotations from the subject’s hitherto unpublished letters. It reads in places like an anthology of wit, but its true merit lies in the congenial atmosphere Pearson created and the perfect way in which he and his subject were attuned. Sydney Smith was a happy man and Pearson was to write a happy book. In the opinion of Richard Ingrams, who contributed an introduction to the Hogarth Press edition in 1984, ‘it is probably his masterpiece’. Certainly it turned out to be his most durable work.

SF magazine subscribers only

Grecian Hours

Published in 1854, it’s the world’s first guidebook to Greece, by which its author, the mysterious GFB, meant classical and historical Greece, many of these places ‘not yet reunited to Christendom’. Admittedly Pausanius produced ten topographical volumes back in the second century ad, and footnotes to Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage describe how to visit places mentioned in his topographical poem, but this was the first informative, practical guide. Suggested routes around Greece accompany essays on language, government, character, soil, the justice system, the economy, history, architecture, religion, plus tips on how and when to go. It’s a good read too. GFB was determined that it should be enjoyed as much beside the fire at home as it was on the road.

SF magazine subscribers only

Living Art

One of the most charming and illuminating memoirs I know is also the largest. A Way of Life: Kettle’s Yard by Jim Ede, published by Cambridge University Press in 1984, is almost a foot square and over an inch thick. It is large because its author was above all a visual man, and he wanted to give due prominence to the many subtly toned black-and-white photographs among which his words gracefully flow. The book is like an ideal visit to Kettle’s Yard, the unique house filled with art and objects Ede created in Cambridge. Through Kettle’s Yard and the way of life it embodies, Ede (1895–1990) influenced generations of Cambridge undergraduates and many artists.

SF magazine subscribers only

From the Farmhouse Window

The middle volume of Adrian Bell’s inter-war farming trilogy, Silver Ley (1931), is, in its quiet, unassuming way, the most poignant memoir I think I have ever read. Picking up where his first book Corduroy left off, it opens in 1921 as Bell wakes up for the very first time on his own Suffolk farm, full of hope, with two newly bought heavy horses, Darkie and Dewdrop, stamping in the yard . . .

Great Scott!

There is a greater accretion of literary anecdote attached to the old John Murray premises at No. 50 Albemarle Street than perhaps to any other building. At times, when working there in the 1970s and ’80s, I felt the place might finally disappear beneath these parasitic lianas and leaves, with me buried inside, but among them there was always one orchid which I treasured, dating from April 1815, when Scott and Byron met there for the first time. A very young John Murray III was a witness and recalled much later how ‘It was a curious sight to see the two greatest poets of the age – both lame – stumping downstairs side by side.’

SF magazine subscribers only

1st December 2008

Slightly Foxed Issue 20: From the Editors

This issue marks a bit of a celebration for us – Slightly Foxed’s fifth we birthday. It seems no time ago – certainly not twenty issues – that we we’re sitting round the kitchen table, arguing about a title, discussing printers and finances and page designs and paper thicknesses, and how to get the word out about a new quarterly that — let’s be frank — a lot of people felt couldn’t possibly work.

- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

From the editors

May News from Slightly Foxed

Summer is almost upon us at Slightly Foxed. The printers in Yorkshire and office foxes in Hoxton are knee-deep in boxes of crisp creamy quarterlies, newly minted books and mounds of bubble-wrap and packing tape in preparation for the dispatch of the summer issue of the quarterly. Subscribers can look forward to receiving it towards the end of the first week of June, and with it be transported to Mandalay with Justin Marozzi, across the channel with Joanna Kavenna, into the world of Whigs with Michael Holroyd, to Nowhere with Travis Elborough . . . but we mustn’t give too much away!

9th April 2015

‘An oasis of beautiful words . . .’

'I absolutely love receiving my Slightly Foxed. To me it’s an oasis of beautiful words and a calm, gentle world to retreat to. I savour each edition and never, never throw them out. I reluctantly loan them to friends and jealously guard their return. Thank you for this precious gift in my life.'

- L. Hughes, Australia

From readers

9th April 2015

‘You have won me as a subscriber . . .’

'I find your organization very charming. The books come really from another era . . . The authors you have, the pieces you do, really was the type of writing in New England in the late '60s/beginning '70s. You people have preserved it! Thus you have won me as a subscriber. I thank you for your excellent selections, stay charming English, as you are.'

- J. Mikelonis, Germany

From readers

Beautifully Folded Prose

Andrew Gifford, Arundel Cathedral, early evening light, Slightly Foxed Issue 45 Intimations of spring at last! The longer days and lighter evenings have arrived on the crest of a brisk March wind, spring bulbs are bravely poking up in Hoxton…

9th April 2015