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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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10th October 2014

‘A handsome handful of thick creaminess . . .’

‘Slightly Foxed is a handsome handful of thick creaminess, always with lovely covers, and would make a great present for someone who likes books, and for who you can never think of a remotely suitable present … the magazine is rather like that voice you always hope to hear behind you in old bookshops . . . “Ah now that’s an interesting one.”’

- Miles Kington

10th October 2014

‘This quarterly passes the re-reading test and deserves its own space in a bookcase . . .’

‘For all ‘Real Readers’ it’s exciting to open a new issue of Slightly Foxed, sure of meeting a kindred spirit in each little essay – though that’s all you can be sure of, given the deliciously unpredictable variety of themes . . .’

- Dervla Murphy

10th October 2014

‘I can’t live without it any more . . .’

‘It's a joy, a delight, a quarterly treat that drives me to the bookshelves, the bookshop or the library in search of forgotten or never-encountered pleasures. I won't say that Slightly Foxed is essential, it's just that I can't live without it any more.’

- Bernard Cornwell

10th October 2014

‘I learn something every time I read it . . .’

‘A handsome magazine full of wonderful surprises and discoveries. I learn something every time I read it.’

- Michael Holroyd

8th October 2014

‘A Sublime Comedy of Unhappiness’

We're delighted that Harold Carlton's memoir Marrying Out is going down so well with readers and the press. Here's Amanda Craig being 'captivated by an uproarious memoir' in The Jewish Chronicle. ‘“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” said Tolstoy, famously. Unhappy Jewish families are another matter . . .

- Amanda Craig, Jewish Chronicle

16th September 2014

Slightly Foxed in . . . Toronto

I Was a Stranger

I Was a Stranger

In September 1944 General Sir John ‘Shan’ Hackett, commander of the 4th Parachute Brigade, was severely wounded and taken prisoner during the Battle of Arnhem. I Was a Stranger is his moving account of what happened to him afterwards. It…

Monkey Business

Monkey Business

Television in the 1970s and 1980s was educational. Bergerac taught us that Jersey was a seething cauldron of crime; Grange Hill introduced a generation of children to sausages and heroin. And Monkey? Monkey taught us all about the frenzied delights of classical Chinese literature, even if it took some of us a while to realize it.

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Small is Beautiful

Small is Beautiful

Recently, ailing and housebound, I looked for succour in a book by a contemporary French novelist, one I remembered hugely enjoying when it first appeared. A good read has to be high on the list of restoratives, and I reckoned that Philippe Delerm’s La Première gorgée de bière (The First Swig of Beer) might be just the ticket. Not because it’s all about beer – in fact the title is rather randomly lifted from one of the book’s thirty-four essays – but because I recalled it included some cheering pages on illness.

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With an Ear to the Earth

With an Ear to the Earth

Koch’s Memoirs of a Birdman opens in 1889 when, at the age of 8, he made the world’s first ever recording of an animal, and closes in 1953 when he fulfilled a lifelong ambition to visit Iceland and record the mournful calls of the Great Northern Diver. This collection of anecdotes, reflections and regrets opens a window on the past, and allows us a glimpse of the character of this remarkable man.

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174517

Is a sequel ever as good as its original? Primo Levi’s autobiographical account of Auschwitz (If This Is a Man) is a celebrated book while its follow-up (The Truce) remains less well known. But that does not tell the whole story.

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Winning Their Spurs

I never read Ronald Welch as a child – he was writing a bit too late for me – but his historical adventure stories have a very familiar ring. In Bowman of Crécy and The Hawk I recognized with nostalgia the dashing heroes of my youth, the dastardly villains, the beautiful but distant women, the chivalry and high moral tone.

Written on the Heart

Written on the Heart

My mother used to read to us on the battered old couch. As the light faded, we would snuggle up and read along with her pointing finger. It was magic; it was spells; it was home. Her glasses slightly askew on her thin, eager face, ‘Come hither,’ she would urge. Come Hither was the title of the orange-covered anthology from which she read. Sometimes she might break off to impress on us: ‘A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master-spirit. Milton.’ We always got quotations in that form. ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day. Shakespeare,’ she would pronounce, crossly plugging in the Hoover. Or ‘If at first you don’t succeed, Try, try again. Proverb’ – tartly, when we complained about homework.

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Marvellous Therapy

Marvellous Therapy

I first met Beryl Bainbridge in 1982, when I went to interview her friend and editor Anna Haycraft for Books & Bookmen. I was later to discover that Beryl practically lived at the Haycrafts’ house in Gloucester Crescent, North London. I remember her wandering into the kitchen and, without preamble, pouring herself a glass of red wine from a two-litre bottle of Valpolicella.

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He Did His Duty

I have read most of C. S. Forester’s books, but had never come across The General until I found a copy last year in a second-hand shop. It nestled next to a biography of Winston Churchill written in 1940 (which was also fascinating). This was something of a coincidence, because in 1941, as he crossed the Atlantic in the battleship Prince of Wales for his first meeting with Roosevelt, Churchill read three of Forester’s Hornblower novels. Hornblower – hardworking, audacious, full of initiative, demanding but careful of his men – would have been for Churchill the perfect model of what a military man should be.

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A Living Landscape

A Living Landscape

It began, I seem to remember, with a grown-out hedge: four huge ash trees bordering a Hampshire footpath, all with the same odd kink in their trunks. The pleasure of recognition, of being able to look at them and know that those kinks were the result of a hedge-laying technique called pleaching that had been done to the young trees several generations ago, had me hooked.

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