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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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How Not to Be a Grandmother

How Not to Be a Grandmother

My grandmother’s idea of cooking was cracking open a raw egg and hurling the contents straight down her throat. She was a poet, deeply religious, immersed in the world of the spirit, never the flesh, who spent years translating Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poems into Scots – an obscure language then and even more so now. The resulting book and the correspondence between her and Hopkins are still kept in the library at Aberdeen University.

Swallows and Amazons for Ever!

Swallows and Amazons for Ever!

The train from the south drew in to the junction with the line that led to the hills. We changed, and already there was freshness in the air on a day of azure skies and deep shadows. I went to admire the Puffing Billy that was to haul us on the last leg of our journey, inhaling the intoxicating cocktail of hot oil and steam that engines exude. The whistle blew, I ran back to the carriage, the doors slammed, and we clanked our way west with the setting sun. I hurried from side to side of the carriage . . .

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Cycling Fox

From Slightly Foxed, Issue 18 James Nunn www.jamesnunn.co.uk

Cover Artist: Slightly Foxed Issue 18, Cyril Edward Power, ‘The Eight’

Cover Artist: Slightly Foxed Issue 18, Cyril Edward Power, ‘The Eight’

Linocut by Cyril Edward Power (1872–1951), reproduced courtesy of the Estate of Cyril Edward Power and the Redfern Gallery.

Strangely Like Real Life

Strangely Like Real Life

My own prime favourite is Anthony Powell’s sequence of novels A Dance to the Music of Time: panoramic, sharply observed, farcical, ironic, yet shot through with what Kingsley Amis called an endlessly inquisitive melancholy. We shadow the narrator Nick Jenkins from the callow half-understanding of youth, in the Twenties, through the drastic remaking of lives and relationships by war, to late middle age in the heady Sixties and Seventies – a whole new age of absurdity against which the novel’s various endgames are played out.

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Yes, Yes, Sir Jasper!

Yes, Yes, Sir Jasper!

I am a Georgette Heyer fan. There. In the full knowledge that many, probably most, of those who consider themselves serious readers will react to such a statement with a disdainful curl of the lip, I’ve said it. And over the nearly fifty years since I read my first Georgette Heyer, just enough other fans have stuck their heads above the parapet for me to know that I’m in good company.

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Cover Artist: Slightly Foxed Issue 17, James Nunn, ‘with apologies to Eric Ravilious ’

Cover Artist: Slightly Foxed Issue 17, James Nunn, ‘with apologies to Eric Ravilious ’

James Nunn burst on to the illustration scene with the panda on Lynne Truss’s bestselling Eats, Shoots & Leaves. He can also draw foxes and elephants, all of which can be seen at www.jamesnunn.co.uk

Cover Artist: Slightly Foxed Issue 16, Posy Simmonds, ‘Fireside Reading’

Cover Artist: Slightly Foxed Issue 16, Posy Simmonds, ‘Fireside Reading’

Posy Simmonds lives and works in London. Her graphic novel Tamara Drewe was published in November 2009 and in 2010 the story was adapted as a feature film.

Underwear Was Important

Underwear Was Important

Posy’s dialogue is as good as her draughtsmanship, and she has a talent for names (an area in which so many writers fall down) which is as good as that of Evelyn Waugh or Anthony Powell. What enchants and convinces in all her work is the brilliantly observed detail. If Posy draws a French coffee pot it is a completely authentic French coffee pot. The appearance of her characters – toddlers, sulky teenagers, pushy mothers, angst-ridden authors, pretentious publishing types – is always spot on. This kind of texture, she says, is the equivalent of verbal description in a novel . . .

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Cover Artist: Slightly Foxed Issue 15, Shazia Mahmood, ‘Loch Eishort ’

Cover Artist: Slightly Foxed Issue 15, Shazia Mahmood, ‘Loch Eishort ’

Shazia Mahmood uses a variety of tools, to create organic and unplanned images. She often paints landscapes while on location. More of her work can be found at www.shaziamahmood.com.

Pernod and Gitanes

Pernod and Gitanes

One afternoon last summer I splashed along Piccadilly with the rain spray-painting the back of my tights, thinking how much nicer Paris in the sunshine would be. And then, from nowhere, a neglected memory darted into my mind. It was of me, aged 18, eating a sandwich and reading Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse on a sunlit bench in the Tuileries Gardens.

Fishing Fox

From Slightly Foxed, Issue 15 James Nunn www.jamesnunn.co.uk

Cover Artist: Slightly Foxed Issue 14, Simon Dorrell, ‘Foxgloves’

Cover Artist: Slightly Foxed Issue 14, Simon Dorrell, ‘Foxgloves’

Simon Dorrell is a freelance illustrator, principally of books and periodicals; a painter of landscapes and interiors in oils and in watercolour; a designer of gardens in the Arts & Crafts tradition; and art editor and co-publisher of the quarterly journal Hortus: www.hortus.co.uk

An Unsettling Read

As the long flight plugged on through the night, Forster’s powerful descriptions of the scenery and climate of India beckoned me. I longed to feel the way the Asian heat ‘leapt forward’ hour by hour, to see the ‘angry orange’ sun that ‘had power without beauty,’ and to smell the toddy palms and neem trees and sweet ‘green-blossomed champak’. I wanted to feel beneath my feet what Forster describes as ‘something hostile in the soil’ and see the sky at night when ‘the stars hang like lamps from the immense vault’.

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Cover Artist: Slightly Foxed Issue 13, Susan Leiper, ‘Spring Garden’

Cover Artist: Slightly Foxed Issue 13, Susan Leiper, ‘Spring Garden’

Susie Leiper is a freelance calligrapher in Edinburgh. Oriental, especially Chinese, art influences most of her work: the poetry on the cover is by the 20th-century Chinese poet Mu Dan, and the garden is inspired by Japanese paste-resist textiles. Susie is a…

Pure Arcadia

I don’t really consider M. F. a cookery writer per se. She is a sort of food alchemist and is positively sensual about the pleasure of food. ‘I just wish my fellow countrymen were more relaxed. They have been conditioned to believe there is something basically evil about physical and moral sensuality.’ Her books are full of recipes, not all of them about food.

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