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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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Another Country

Another Country

Bell’s first book has the virtues which allow it to transcend its times: acute observation, sincerity and that simplicity of style which does not date. Published in 1930, it portrays a way of life which had been overturned by the First World War and was to go on changing rapidly through the century. It is more than a nostalgic lament for a vanishing world, however: it describes a way of living that is very much alive.

Cover Artist: Slightly Foxed Issue 22, Simon Laurie, ‘Greek Boat’

Cover Artist: Slightly Foxed Issue 22, Simon Laurie, ‘Greek Boat’

Simon Laurie trained at the Glasgow School of Art and is a member of the Royal Scottish Society of Watercolourists and the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts. He has won many awards and his work is in a number of public…

Too Much Clevverness

Too Much Clevverness

Hoban started writing Riddley Walker in 1974 and finished it five years later. It is a masterpiece. Those who know it love it, and whole websites are devoted to it, with chapter-by-chapter annotations deciphering the language, and online chat rooms discussing its themes. In 2005 a Russell Hoban Some-Poasyum (a symposium in Riddleyspeak) was held in London, with readings, quizzes and a pilgrimage to Kent to visit locations in the novel. Every 4 February, Russell Hoban’s birthday, die-hard fans leave typed quotations from his novels in random places for strangers to find.

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From Cheltenham to Lochiel

From Cheltenham to Lochiel

Rereading The Flight of the Heron, I recaptured something of the uncomplicated delight and excitement that I had felt first timeround. The story of Ewen Cameron of Ardroy, a minor chieftain of the Cameron clan, his part in the ill-fated campaign to put Charles Edward Stuart on the throne, and his difficult but growing friendship with an English redcoat officer, Keith Windham, had not lost its power to stir.

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Sound Nonsense

The words rolled out, natural and clear, and I listened with new ears and understanding. Enlightenment had finally come. Passages spoken aloud in an Irish accent, by someone who loved the prose enough to commit long passages to memory, released the book’s power. Its beauty had been unlocked not by a literary intellectual, but by a half-tight man in a cheap suit standing at the bar of a Dublin pub. Finnegans Wake was revealed as a work of sound rather than sense, a form of high falutin, Gaelic, literary rap. Ireland talking in her sleep. It was as if Brian had taken me by the elbow, and guided me into this particular tavern to receive a final, Celtic benediction.

SF magazine subscribers only

‘If the rules of ‘Desert Island Discs’ allow a periodical instead of a book . . .’

‘I'm not sure if the rules of 'Desert Island Discs' allow a periodical instead of a book; but if they do – and no doubt the people at Hoxton Square could arrange delivery by homing albatross – I'd go for a subscription to Slightly Foxed and ration myself, very strictly, to an article a week . . . And I know I'd still read it in one go the day it arrived.’

- Tim Mackintosh-Smith

‘The arrival of a new issue of Slightly Foxed makes me drop everything . . .’

‘The arrival of a new issue of Slightly Foxedmakes me drop everything. I read it from cover to cover and it immediately sends me off to order a number of the books that it features.’

- Alexander McCall Smith

‘Always unputdownable . . .’

‘Sometimes deep, sometimes surprising, often eccentric, but always unputdownable.’

- Posy Simmonds

‘Always a red-letter day when the post includes Slightly Foxed . . .’

‘It's always a red-letter day when the post includes Slightly Foxed – gorgeous new cover, choice list of contents.’

- Penelope Lively

20th May 2009

‘Beautifully produced . . .’

‘Absolutely beautifully produced.’

- BBC Radio 4 Today

From readers

‘I know it’s planned, but it feels fortuitous and that’s quite an art . . .’

‘A quarterly box of delights - always something unexpected to excite the taste buds of the bookish. I know it's planned, but it feels fortuitous and that's quite an art.’

- Paul Routledge

20th May 2009

Time Out

‘Packed with anecdotes, reminiscences and essays about books, writers and the trade. If you love books you'll love Slightly Foxed.’

- Time Out

From the press

Before the Sun Set

This wonderful recreation of a time and a climate of mind – a hundred years ago, one realizes, startled – is not just an evocation of place but also of the child’s eye view. A Late Beginner ranks quite simply with the greatest accounts of how it is to be a child, to see with that strange, skewed, uncontaminated vision.

Cover Artist: Slightly Foxed Issue 21, Francis Farmar, ‘Fox and Steam Train

Cover Artist: Slightly Foxed Issue 21, Francis Farmar, ‘Fox and Steam Train

Francis Farmer describes himself as a painter of places. His work gives contemporary flavour to ‘prospect’ pictures, which bend and stretch the landscape it in order to describe more than can be seen from a single earth-bound viewpoint. www.francisfarmar.com

A Blazing Talent

A Blazing Talent

How well is Pamela Frankau remembered? She was born on 3 January 1908, so last year was her centenary. But . . . no garlands? No memorials? No flourish in the literary pages? Well, Pamela would be the first to look on this with wry amusement, and without complaint . . .

SF magazine subscribers only

All Washed Up

Many years ago, when I was in my early twenties, I lived in Copenhagen where I was registered with the Foreign Ministry as correspondent for The Times. But I made my living washing dishes. The paper paid by the line and used so little of my copy that I was forced to find illegal work as a scullion in one of the city’s less elegant restaurants. And it was during this time, morbidly attracted by the title, that I found a copy of Down and Out in Paris and London.

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