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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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The Golden Road to Samarkand

The Golden Road to Samarkand

Here at SF our first instinct was to quietly ignore the overblown sentimentality of Saint Valentine’s Day but a handful of romantic souls have suggested we mark the occasion in some way, and give a nod to love in this month’s newsletter.…

16th January 2015

‘The most rewarding £40 I will spend this year . . .’

‘Probably the most rewarding £40 I will spend this year.’

- C. Skinner, Devon

16th January 2015

‘We love and look forward to receiving Slightly Foxed . . .’

‘We love and look forward to receiving Slightly Foxed. I try to ration it but end up swallowing it in one gulp.’

- J. Allan, Switzerland

1st December 2014

Slightly Foxed in . . . Venice

Auburn in Wartime

I had heard of Margery Allingham, of course, and had read The Tiger in the Smoke as a teenager, but I had no idea that she had written an account of her life in the Essex village of Tolleshunt D’Arcy between July 1938 and May 1941. This was a stroke of luck: to find a proper writer (with a large garden and a gardener) who could honestly and clear-sightedly anatomize her feelings and sensations, and quote those of her neighbours, during the Munich crisis, the great evacuation of children and mothers to the country when war broke out, the retreat from Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain and the London Blitz.

SF magazine subscribers only

26th November 2014

‘A quarterly full of delights’

‘. . . a quarterly full of delights and articles about books new and old, published and out of print, beautifully illustrated and written by excellent authors . . .‘

- Random Jottings

6th November 2014

‘I was pleased and amazed . . .’

‘I was pleased and amazed to see you are publishing the Ronald Welch books. As a child I adored them and they infused in me a great love of history . . . Over the years I have collected most of his books but it was a delight to find The Hawk at your shop. I never thought in this age that enough people were still interested in his books to consider re-publishing.’

- G. Frost, Melbourne

The Temptation of Mrs Harris

It was astonishing to me that a grown-up could cry, and more than astonishing that anyone should cry for joy. The memory came back to me a few weeks ago, as I reread, with my 9-year-old daughter, Paul Gallico’s Flowers for Mrs Harris. For Gallico, most fondly remembered as the author of The Snow Goose, was a master of the bittersweet, of the mysterious kinship between suffering and joy. He knew how to fold together humour and poignant detail in just the right proportions to prevent his prose from curdling into mawkishness and sentimentality.

SF magazine subscribers only

Famous People’s Foxes

Famous People’s Foxes

We asked Michael Palin to do a drawing and he said he couldn’t draw. Instead he wrote out a very generous cheque to the Children’s Hospital School at Great Ormond Street, which is to receive the proceeds from this book. He had us momentarily…

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

A Spiritual Affinity

I don’t know about you, but I have a number of books on the go at any one time. There’s one in the downstairs loo, one in the bathroom, a couple by my armchair in the living-room, and two or three by the bed. But one book has been permanently by my bed since my wife gave it me for Christmas in 2000, and I turn to it more or less every night for the crisp good sense which is guaranteed wherever I open it, and perhaps a laugh as well.

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Growing up American

Birds of America is supposed to be Mary McCarthy’s weakest novel, though it was her own favourite. Yet it is a fine book – a brilliant study of a clever, odd teenager growing into a man. And like all good books it seems to get better each time I read it.

SF magazine subscribers only

Cambridge Canvas

Cambridge Canvas

For almost a decade there’s been one particular book we’ve been longing to reissue. Now at last, as we reach our tenth anniversary, we’ve got the opportunity to do so. When I wrote about it in one of our very early issues, I said that for me a home without a copy of Gwen Raverat’s Period Piece (1952) was like a home without a cat – lacking an essential cheering and comfortable element – and for me that still holds true.

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.

SF magazine subscribers only

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.

SF magazine subscribers only

16th October 2014

Slightly Foxed in . . . Seattle