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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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Three in a Bed

Three in a Bed

Just as he prefers to drive rather than be driven, my husband would rather read aloud than be read to. Both preferences suit me fine as I hate getting back into the original lane after overtaking and I get a sore throat after two pages of reading aloud. Over the past year he has read the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy, followed by Watership Down, followed by the Odyssey in the E. V. Rieu translation. Each book has brought different delights and challenges.
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Marking Time

Marking Time

Do you know where you put the window cleaner’s bill? Do you remember that you missed your last appointment at the dentist’s because you had mislaid her appointment card? When these things happen, do you put it down to just another senior moment or, perhaps, an indication of a worrying frequency of lapses in concentration, usually noted in older friends and relations? Might I suggest that you take a few moments to riffle through the last half-dozen books that you have read recently? You may be surprised at what you find.
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Around a Room in Forty-two Days

Around a Room in Forty-two Days

A Journey around My Room was the unlikely result of a duel. In 1790 Xavier de Maistre, a 27-year-old officer in the Army of Piedmont, fell out with someone over something, somewhere in Turin. One party called the other out, a duel was fought, and thus an offence was committed which merited punishment. De Maistre was sentenced to six weeks’ house arrest. Scarcely cruel and unusual, in that he was allowed the comforts of his own room, the company of his dog Rosine and the devoted attention of his manservant Joannetti. Still, for a full-blooded young man forced to cool his heels for forty-two long days and nights with only four walls to stare at, the prospect must have seemed a miserable one.
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Bain’t Feasible

Bain’t Feasible

It was May 1968. Students all over Europe were in revolt. My heart was with them, but my bottom was on a chair in the agricultural section of the university library, where I was revising for the end-ofyear exams. Eventually I could take no more of the life-cycle of the frit fly, that scourge of the oat crop, and got up to stroll round the shelves, vaguely scanning titles: Profitable Sheep Farming, Soil Conditions and Plant Growth, The Pig: Modern Husbandry and Marketing . . . Then my eye was drawn to a book I’d never seen before: Farmer’s Glory, by A. G. Street.
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Catching a Tartar

In April 1851 Leo Tolstoy was a university dropout, troubled by gambling debts and plagued by venereal disease. To escape his drifter’s life in Moscow, he set out to join his brother Nikolai’s artillery unit in Chechnya with the vague intention of enlisting in the army. By the time Tolstoy made his journey, many well-educated young men, inspired by Pushkin and Lermontov, had already gone to fight the peoples inhabiting the mountain fastnesses on Russia’s southern frontier (and perhaps win the heart of a demure tribal princess). The Caucasus quickly became a staple of the empire’s popular fiction, populated by Russian Flashmans.
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