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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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Git a Hoss!

Radio stations in my youth were always running phone-ins to find the greatest pop songs of all time – that is, of the last few decades. The top song, as I recall, was always the same: ‘Stairway to Heaven’. Likewise, polls of the greatest novels have their inevitable winners. Ask the public, and it’s The Lord of the Rings. Ask writers or critics, and it’s Ulysses or Proust. In 1998, Modern Library offered its 100 best English-language novels of the twentieth century. The list, determined by the editorial board, of course made Joyce No. 1. For me, one cheering inclusion was the book that scraped in at No. 100: The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington. I had thought this splendid novel almost entirely forgotten, other than as source material for the brilliant but troubled 1942 Orson Welles film of the same name.

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Marching with the Trottas

Some novels creep up quietly on you from behind, while others grasp you firmly by the collar and sweep you briskly into their firmament, barely giving you time to catch your breath. The Radetzky March is certainly among the latter, and I duly succumbed within pages, when I discovered it gently simmering with potential on a holiday bookshelf (other people’s bookshelves always simmer with more potential than one’s own). Holidays are, by definition, an attempt to embrace the unfamiliar, and this novel’s very title, so redolent of Mitteleuropa, promises immersion in a different world, the doomed Austro-Hungarian Empire on the fringes of which its author, Joseph Roth, led his own doomed and self-destructive life.

SF magazine subscribers only

A Reluctant Hero

What would you do if you were a soldier, the last in a long line of fighting ancestors who had all distinguished themselves in battle, but you really hated going to war and wanted to give it all up and become a writer? This is the dilemma for Chris Carey, serving in the 43rd Light Infantry under Wellington in the Peninsular War. He’s the reluctant hero of Captain of Foot, the latest volume in the Slightly Foxed Cubs edition of the Carey saga by Ronald Welch.

SF magazine subscribers only

Never a Belonger

Richard Cobb in England seems, if not quite an oxymoron, at least a bizarre fortuity, an accident of birth, like El Greco in Crete or Livingstone in Lanarkshire. For was he not one of the most Frenchified of historians? Did he not write huge scholarly tomes in French? Had he not been one of those rare souls who manage to acquire a second identity in a seconde patrie?

SF magazine subscribers only

24th February 2014

Top writers draw foxes – in pictures

‘To celebrate its 10th anniversary – and to raise money for The Great Ormond Street Hospital School – the readers’ quarterly Slightly Foxed asked celebrated writers including Andrew Motion, Carol Ann Duffy and Kazuo Ishiguro, to draw a fox. Here are some of the wily creatures they came up with . . .’

- Guardian

From the press

16th March 2014

Slightly Foxed in . . . Queensland

From readers

A Winter Wayzgoose

Team Fox is off on a winter wayzgoose this weekend. In celebration of our 10th birthday, eight vixens, seven honorary dog foxes and three spaniels are heading to a Tudor house in West Devon tomorrow. We’re anticipating almighty downpours, whipping…

4th February 2014

‘Oh you haven’t heard of Slightly Foxed?’

‘If you’ve ever wandered down London’s Gloucester Road (and which literary bluffer hasn’t?) you might have spotted an unassuming bookshop called Slightly Foxed . . .

- Bluffers Guide to Arts & Culture

From the press

Pleasure, Comfort or Escape

We will soon be ten! Indeed, we can’t quite believe it ourselves, but the publication of our 41st issue in March will mark a decade in print. Whilst here in the office we look ever forward to the new publications…

21st February 2014

‘May you go on for decades to come . . .’

Slightly Foxed is pure happiness. May you go on for decades to come.

- Ronald Blythe

From readers

Round a kitchen table

Life at Slightly Foxed started with Gail, Hazel & Steph round a kitchen table and here we are, almost ten years later . . .

1st March 2007

Slightly Foxed Issue 13: From the Editors

Emerging from the miasma of winter colds and flu that hung over the office – even Pugwash was under the weather – we were immensely cheered by the splendid selection of Christmas cards you sent us, many of them fox-related. We enjoy all your letters and postcards too. Thank you so much. We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: our contact with you, our subscribers, is one of the great pleasures of life at Slightly Foxed.

- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

From the editors

16th January 2014

Slightly Foxed in . . . Alonissos

From readers

With Bold Knife and Fork

Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher did write exquisitely. She also wrote a vast amount, and one might fear indigestion on so hefty a diet of opinion, scathing contempt and passion for the many and varied food experiences of her long and pretty colourful life. Still, I have yet to tire of either her prose or her subject.

Soames’s Second Coming

I bought my copy of Seven Men in the late Sixties in a secondhand bookshop in Sutton Coldfield. The town had two second-hand bookshops, which both closed years ago, but I can recall every shelf and see titles, bindings and jackets in eidetic detail. I suspect many other lovers of books have this useless but comforting gift, even if they spend half the morning trying to remember where they put their glasses. Seven Men had – has, it’s on the desk beside me – a navy blue cloth binding; on the front cover of my copy, like a partial eclipse of the moon, is the white imprint of the base of a teacup. It is the 1920 second impression of the first edition and on the front free endpaper is the signature of a Francis T. Bellin, followed by the date ‘1922’. When I got it the pages were uncut: Mr Bellin had missed a treat.

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The Passing of Old Europe

It was a passing reference in Robert Musil’s novel The Man without Qualities to ‘the oracular casting of lead that fate performs with us’ that jogged my memory. When I was a child, on New Year’s Eve, we would melt small lead ingots in a spoon over a candle flame, and drop the silvery liquid into a jug of water. The shape it assumed as it fell, hissing and steaming into the future, was said to predict what the coming year held in store. It is an old German tradition that my father, a refugee from the Third Reich, upheld.

SF magazine subscribers only