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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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Slightly Foxed Autumn Launch Party at Topping & Co. Bath

Slightly Foxed Autumn Launch Party at Topping & Co. Bath

We were delighted to welcome readers to Topping & Company Booksellers of Bath, where we raised a glass to the Autumn issue of Slightly Foxed magazine. This was our first launch party for over two years and we were very happy to be back in Bath with our friends at Topping & Co. in their beautiful new premises. Tuesday 20 September 2022 • Drinks and light bites from 6.30 p.m. Topping & Company Booksellers York Street Bath BA1 1NG Please click here for more information and tickets.
Nella Last’s War | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

Nella Last’s War | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

Introducing the latest addition to the Slightly Foxed Editions list, No. 60: Nella Last’s War: The Second World War Diaries of Housewife, 49 In 1937 the social research group Mass Observation launched a project to record the lives of ordinary people in Britain by recruiting 500 volunteer diarists. One of these was Nella Last, a housewife living in Barrow-in-Furness with a husband and two grown-up sons, one a trainee tax-inspector and one in the army. So far, so seemingly ordinary, but there was nothing ordinary about Nella. She left us an unrivalled account of life in wartime Britain that is not only a piece of social history but also the portrait of a woman you feel could have run the country, given half a chance.

Bookshop of the Quarter: Autumn 2022

We received a cheering email from Eduardo Ballester, a subscriber based on the south coast of Uruguay, back in 2019 which detailed plans to open a bookshop and a wish to stock Slightly Foxed. We jumped at the chance of our magazine and books finding readers in such a far-flung location, and eagerly anticipated the launch of Rizoma in La Juanita, José Ignacio a year later. It is always a thrill to see photos of our publications in such a beautiful setting. Please read on to hear more about Rizoma from Eduardo, pick up a book recommendation or two and cast your eyes over the striking photographs of the librería.
Stockists
‘Every offering is a true gem’ | New this Autumn from Slightly Foxed

‘Every offering is a true gem’ | New this Autumn from Slightly Foxed

Greetings, dear readers. We’re delighted to announce that the new Autumn issue of Slightly Foxed (No. 75) has now left the printing press at Smith Settle and will start to arrive with subscribers in the UK very soon and elsewhere over the next few weeks. It ranges far and wide in the usual eclectic manner: Galen O’Hanlon goes to the seaside with R. C. Sherriff • Ysenda Maxtone Graham enjoys a housewife’s wartime diaries • Christopher Rush meets Miss Jean Brodie in her prime • David Fleming goes monster hunting in Loch Ness • Sue Quinn celebrates Florence White’s English cooking • Adam Sisman faces a Martian invasion with H. G. Wells, and much more besides . . . With it, as usual, you’ll find a print copy of our latest Readers’ Catalogue, listing new books, our backlist, seasonal reading from other publishers’ bookshelves and a selection of offers and bundles. We hope it will provide plenty of recommendations for reading off the beaten track this autumn.
Julia Blackburn | Eulogy for Ronald Blythe | Bury St Edmunds, 1 March 2023

Julia Blackburn | Eulogy for Ronald Blythe | Bury St Edmunds, 1 March 2023

It’s odd how one gets to know someone better, or at least in more detail, after they have gone. Ronnie was often in my mind ever since I first met him in 1991, but it’s only now that I begin to see him in his entirety, as it were. I watched a film made when he was in his 50s. The slight figure of a man with a shock of hair and very narrow hips, walking through the familiar streets of Aldeburgh and talking as he walks. ‘So many friends have died,’ he says, ‘but I have no sense of elegy. They are living because I am living. That must be it.’ And now he is living because we are living.
Episode 45: Ronald Blythe: A Life Well Written

Episode 45: Ronald Blythe: A Life Well Written

‘I would like to be remembered as a good writer and a good man . . . Writers are observers. We are natural lookers, watchers . . . it seems to me quite wonderful that I have so long been able to make a living from something I love so much.’ So wrote the writer, editor and famed chronicler of rural life Ronald Blythe for the Mail on Sunday in 2004. That Ronald (or Ronnie, as he preferred to be known), who died aged 100 in early 2023, will be remembered as a good writer is irrefutable. Many Slightly Foxed listeners will know and love not only Akenfield – his bestselling 1969 portrait of a fictionalized East Anglian village – and the ‘Word from Wormingford’ column for the Church Times but also his unparalleled collection of short stories, poems, histories, novels and essays and, most recently, his year-long diary published as Next to Nature, which celebrates the slow perpetual turn of the farming year, the liturgical calendar and the rhythms of village life.
60 minutes
Episode 44: Jean Rhys: Voyages in the Dark

Episode 44: Jean Rhys: Voyages in the Dark

The writer Jean Rhys is best known for Wide Sargasso Sea, her haunting prequel to Jane Eyre, yet her own life would have made for an equally compelling novel. Miranda Seymour, author of the definitive Jean Rhys biography I Used to Live Here Once, joins the Slightly Foxed team to follow Rhys’s often rackety life and shine light on her writing. Born Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams on the island of Dominica, she dreamed of being an actress. And she did play many roles over the years: raconteur, recluse, wife (three times), grieving mother, enthusiastic drinker . . . But her most important role was that of a writer. We begin in the Caribbean with Smile Please, Rhys’s unfinished autobiography of her early years, where we meet a white creole girl who feels like an outsider. This feeling lingers, whether she is living in squalid London, on Paris’s Left Bank or in rural Devon. The women in her novels feel it too: Anna adrift in London in Voyage in the Dark, Julia leaving Paris in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Antoinette bound for Mr Rochester’s attic in Wide Sargasso Sea.
60 minutes
Episode 43: Dinner with Joseph Johnson

Episode 43: Dinner with Joseph Johnson

Bookseller, publisher, Dissenter and dinner-party host, Joseph Johnson was a great enabler in the late 18th-century literary landscape . . . Daisy Hay and Kathryn Sutherland join the Slightly Foxed editors to discuss Joseph Johnson’s life and work at St Paul’s Churchyard, the heart of England’s book trade since medieval times. We listen to the conversation around Johnson’s dining-table as Coleridge and Wordsworth, Joseph Priestley and Benjamin Franklin, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Blake debate the great issues of the day. And we watch as Johnson embarks on a career that will become the foundation stone of modern publishing. We hear how he takes on Olaudah Equiano’s memoir of enslavement and champions Anna Barbauld’s books for children, how he argues with William Cowper over copyright and how he falls foul of bookshop spies and is sent to prison.
60 minutes
A Sort of Life | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

A Sort of Life | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

Graham Greene once said that writing A Sort of Life, this memoir of his early life, ‘was in the nature of a psychoanalysis. I made a long journey through time and I was one of my characters.’ Certainly the younger self that emerges is as complex and intriguing as any of those he created in his novels. There can be no more fascinating or illuminating account of what it takes to become a writer. We’re delighted to report that this classic memoir will be available to readers again. We first published it in our series of Slightly Foxed Editions more than a decade ago, and it proved so popular that it soon sold out. However, we are now reissuing it in a handsome hardback Plain Foxed Edition.
14th September 2022

‘As eccentric as any of Lytton Strachey’s Victorians’ | The Best Book Podcasts for Literary Fans

I beg your indulgence for one podcast that is as eccentric as any of Lytton Strachey’s Victorians, a podcast that grew out of a small British literary quarterly . . . The magazine and its podcast focus on the types of British authors and preoccupations that will have you eager to curl up in a club chair with a cuppa and a bikkie, the better to concentrate on narratives about Barbara Pym, Evelyn Waugh, Francis Spufford, unusual bookshops, and more.
- Bethanne Patrick for Pocket Casts
From readers
1st December 2022

Slightly Foxed Issue 76: From the Editors

This issue of Slightly Foxed comes with our very best wishes to you all from all of us here for Christmas and the coming year. However there’s no escaping the fact that these are anxious times, and we were touched by a reader in Australia who wrote to us recently: ‘I can only say, to all the Slightly Foxed team, that you are a saviour. Slightly Foxed has kept me in touch, kept me sane, made me relish the humour, the warmth, the quirky charm of the English way of doing things.’ Wherever you are in the world, we hope you feel the same.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
Comrade-in-Suds | From the Slightly Foxed archives

Comrade-in-Suds | From the Slightly Foxed archives

Warm wishes from SF HQ, where we’re clattering through the archive and plunging into the world of the plongeur with Christopher Robbins and George Orwell. Many of you may know the wonderful writing and colourful life of Christopher Robbins from his comic masterpiece, The Empress of Ireland (Slightly Foxed Edition No. 51). However, before he befriended the outrageous Irish film-maker Brian Desmond Hurst, as documented in that delicious memoir, he lived in Copenhagen, took a job as a scullion and found a copy of Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. The book ‘seemed to be written by a soul mate, a letter from one unpublished writer and dishwasher to another.’ 
Beside the Seaside

Beside the Seaside

There is something timeless about the British seaside holiday. When I was a child we’d visit my grandparents, who had a beach hut at Studland on the Dorset coast. I would spend happy afternoons playing elaborate games in the sand, interrupted only by Granny leaping from the beach hut in her skirted bathing suit, calling out to me: ‘Galey darling, we are going for a swim!’ This would fill me with terror: I had still not yet learnt to swim. ‘Nonsense!’ she’d say, diving in. When I refused to go further than mid-shin, she’d put a thumb to her nose and surge off in a no-nonsense breaststroke. This daily ordeal taught me that a family holiday by the sea is not a straightforwardly happy affair: there are always, as my mum would say, good bits and bad bits.
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