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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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Sweet Revenge

There are many definitions of what makes a great work of literature, but for my money a great book must do one thing above all else: it must create a world of its own, with its own unique atmosphere and moral universe. It must invent that world and transport you into it, and make you believe in it, from first sentence to last. Paradoxically you will inhabit it intimately as an autonomous world existing independently of you, the reader. The plot and the setting, the characters and their language – all exist elsewhere, and you merely overhear, oversee, even though you are drawn into the very heart and essence of the creation. This is the godlike miracle of great writing. Homer did it, Shakespeare did it, the Brontës and Dickens did it. The new world the author creates is peculiar and true to that particular poem, play or novel, and true to no other.

Something Always Turned Up

Of course The Young Ardizzone is not a children’s book, rather a book about childhood intended for adults, but here, as in the Lucy and Little Tim series, the integration of words and images is complete. As a work of art the text alone, admirable as it is, would not be in the same league. Anyone experiencing it as an audio-book would miss a great deal.

30th August 2013

High/Low: Modern Classic

Slightly Foxed looking very stylish in a beautiful bookcase made by Erik Heywood of BOOK/SHOP on design website, Dwell.

From the press

16th October 2013

Slightly Foxed in . . . Singapore

From readers

Foxes, Foxes Everywhere

Where are you reading this? This month’s article would have us believe that you’re in the bath. However, emails are not quite as bath-friendly as the quarterly, so we hope you’ve chosen a drier spot to scroll through this month’s missive.…

27th August 2013

‘Knight Crusader is beautifully written . . .’

The Carey Novels by Ronald Welch Slightly Foxed is one of life’s most wonderful pleasures. Their quarterly is always full of fascinating and interesting articles on books past and present and their own published books are also quirky and lovely…

- Random Jottings

From readers

26th July 2013

‘Keep up the good work . . .’ A. Hill, West Sussex

‘I’ve been meaning to enthuse in writing about your magazine and books for some time now. Just finished The Flame Trees of Thika and found it riveting, a wonderful evocation of the sights and sounds of Africa. Alan Moorehead is next…

- A. Hill, West Sussex

From readers

A Nightmare on Wheels

Finally the grass has returned to Hoxton Square, and we’ve been taking our sandwiches into the sunshine for lunch. We’ve got our fingers crossed for a long, hot summer, but should that fail to materialise we’re recommending a visit to…

A Golden Summer

Cape-bound

Soon after my Dublin grandfather’s death in 1946 several heavy teachests were delivered by rail to our Lismore home. My father gleefully pored over the numerous bulky tomes: the Works of Samuel Richardson in seven volumes (1785), a History of Free Masonry in five volumes, a rare numbered edition (No. 775) of the works of Henry Fielding in ten volumes with an introductory essay by Leslie Stephen, etc. etc. Being then aged 14 I was unexcited until I came upon a slim volume (foolscap octavo) by a mid-Victorian Englishwoman identifiable on p.1 as a kindred spirit. Ever since, Lucie Duff Gordon’s Letters from the Cape, written to a devoted husband and a worried mother, has been among my favourite accounts of travel.

SF magazine subscribers only

An Eye for Absurdity

Village fêtes are dangerous places to buy books. The conviction that somewhere among the ancient almanacs and dog-eared Jilly Coopers lurks an underpriced treasure is so strong that I find it hard to come away empty-handed, and habitually end up with a selection of curios I will never read. But now and again I strike lucky, as I did with my 1966 first edition of Michael Frayn’s The Russian Interpreter.

SF magazine subscribers only

Rolling down to Rio

Between the ages of 7 and 11 I often saw my father take the stage in a packed and smoky concert hall. It was a once-a-week performance. Sometimes I watched from the wings as he took command of the spotlight. Applause subsided into hush. The pianist rippled an intro and Father drew deep, hauling his baritone from his belly and delivering each word bright and clear.

SF magazine subscribers only

Feverish Haste

In 2005 an excellent article by Lucy Lethbridge about Denton Welch appeared in Slightly Foxed. So why another? Well, he is one of those writers who attract a small but passionate band of devotees. Though regarded as a minor author by many, much as Saki is, or Nancy Mitford or Henry Green, he has nothing in common with any of these. He is unique, and my love of his books has continued throughout my reading life.

SF magazine subscribers only

The Girl from the Bogs

When Molly Keane’s best-known novel, Good Behaviour (1981), was pipped to the Booker Prize post by Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children she did not much mind. She was ‘ecstatic’ over its success, calling it ‘too extraordinary’. But this extravagant tone was neither archness nor Mitfordian flippancy (although, appropriate to her upbringing, she exhibited a strong, unsnobbish belief in the value of taste). She meant it. Molly Keane (1904–96) never considered herself a writer: ‘It’s all a great surprise to me – if you were to give me some old book of mine I’d read it with great surprise as though I had no connection with it at all.’

Championing the Underdog

From Herodotus’ and Thucydides’ time the war book has been with us as an ever-present literary companion to the massacres on the battlefield. I took Norman Lewis’s Naples ’44 to Iraq with me in 2004 and found its humanity and honesty instantly compelling. Graham Greene considered Lewis ‘one of our best writers, not of any particular decade but of our century’, and during the darker days in Iraq it was strangely comforting to realize that there is little new in conflict. From ‘friendly fire’ and war profiteers to prostitution and petty bureaucracy, it has all been seen before.

A Poem Turned into a Sword

The Woman Warrior was my book. I say this not to avoid accusations of parti pris – after all, everybody who writes about a book for Slightly Foxed can by definition be accused of that – but simply to make clear where I come from. In the winter of 1975 an agent sent the manuscript to Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. in New York, where I was a senior editor. It ended up in my hands, because I was supposed to be the house China expert. (I had picked up some Mandarin when I was in the army.) I remember reading it in a bleak, smoke-filled room in the Criminal Court Building on Centre Street while waiting for jury duty, and being stunned. I had never read anything like it before. I convinced my boss to take it on for publication.

SF magazine subscribers only