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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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Terror among the Wheatfields

Terror among the Wheatfields

When the BBC asked me to make a radio programme about Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966), I had not yet read it, and didn’t want to. I’d mentally filed it in the same category as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and American Psycho: books that I might have liked in my teens and twenties but that now seemed insufferably macho. I’d not that long ago had a baby and I had no interest in reading about a family being murdered in their beds.
SF magazine subscribers only
How the World Works

How the World Works

When I was a child, my father – who was a materials scientist, and used sometimes to make gunpowder in the back garden – told me that the study of physics was simply the study of how the world works. Optics and glass were his particular field. Occasionally he’d stand at the kitchen sink attempting to hand-grind a lens for a telescope or fetch a microscope and persuade my mother to supply a drop of blood for a slide. Observing the moon, or the bloody smear we could never quite resolve into cells, he’d be as fascinated by the means of procuring these images as by the images themselves and would try to teach me the principles of focal length.
SF magazine subscribers only
Hungry for Love

Hungry for Love

The past is a foreign country: they eat things differently there. At a picnic, for example, they might decant a tin of slimy boiled ham on to a dinner plate and eat it with a knife and fork, along with Heinz Salad Cream served in a sauce boat. They consume jelly with evaporated milk, cucumber slices in vinegar, plates of reformed cow’s tongue – and on special occasions they might serve them all at once on a wheeled trolley. Instead of vegetables they buy instant dried peas in cardboard boxes. They grill grapefruits. They’ve never heard of hummus.
Good Books and Artichoke Bottoms

Good Books and Artichoke Bottoms

Over fourteen years as a journalist, I have written more than 2,000 articles. I’ve filed book reviews, exhibition reviews, columns, features, interviews and an investigation into bubble-wrap recycling. Nothing has generated so much interest, passion and sheer steaming outrage as the piece I wrote about my love of ironing. Letters were sent to the editor of The Times, friends emailed, friends’ mothers emailed, comments poured in online, social media went mad. The world divided into those who thought I was a tragic throwback chained to an ironing board and those who, like me, felt that when life’s problems seemed insurmountable, there was comfort in a stack of handkerchiefs ironed into perfect squares.
SF magazine subscribers only
1st June 2025

Slightly Foxed Issue 86: From the Editors

June, the month when London begins to empty out and then fill up again with summer visitors, on the buses, on the underground, and in the restaurants and coffee shops around Hoxton Square. It’s the time of year when, at Slightly Foxed too, we begin to think of getting out of the office to visit bookshops in other parts of the country, or to take part in the kind of small literary festivals and book club get-togethers that are a million miles away from the high-profile sales events that the bigger literary festivals have become. We’ve had some of our most heartwarming, entertaining and sometimes eccentric experiences in village halls, country churches and occasionally private houses, where we meet up with readers and get a real sense of what’s going on in the places where they live. In fact on 20 June we two will be appearing at an afternoon event for the Two Moors Festival, at St Winifred’s Church, Manaton, on the edge of Dartmoor. So if you live in, or happen to be visiting, this lovely part of the south-west, please do come along (for details visit www.twomoorsfestival.com).
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
Toast | *New* from the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

Toast | *New* from the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

Introducing the forthcoming addition to the Slightly Foxed Editions list, No. 71: Nigel Slater | TOAST Nigel Slater, OBE, is perhaps Britain’s most treasured food writer, loved by cooks the nation over for his comfortingly do-able recipes and his colourful writing, the companionable tone of his bestselling cookbooks and his longstanding column in the Observer. In his funny and poignant memoir Toast he describes the ingredients that combined to make him the cookery writer he is today – a childhood that certainly had very little that was comfortable about it.
A Second Home | ‘Seven years ago, is it really so long? They were years in which perhaps half a million words were drafted and redrafted . . .’

A Second Home | ‘Seven years ago, is it really so long? They were years in which perhaps half a million words were drafted and redrafted . . .’

When Dame Hilary Mantel died, many readers of her novels learned more about her life and her heroic struggle with the serious medical condition from which she suffered for many years without a diagnosis. Nowhere is this more vividly or more movingly described than in her own powerful and haunting memoir, Giving up the Ghost. It is a story of ‘wraiths and phantoms’, a story not easy to forget.
A Spy in a Courteous Enemy Camp | ‘You would find first, I think, if placed in the situation yourself, that it was extraordinarily interesting . . .’

A Spy in a Courteous Enemy Camp | ‘You would find first, I think, if placed in the situation yourself, that it was extraordinarily interesting . . .’

In 1972 James Morris booked a return ticket to Casablanca and underwent what would now be called gender reassignment surgery. Soon afterwards Jan Morris wrote a book about what it had felt like to live – or try to live – for forty odd years with the absolute conviction that she was a woman trapped in a man’s body, and how this agony had finally been resolved. That book was Conundrum and when it was published in 1974 it caused a sensation.
Extract from Giving Up the Ghost | Part One: A Second Home

Extract from Giving Up the Ghost | Part One: A Second Home

It is a Saturday, late July, 2000; we are in Reepham, Norfolk, at Owl Cottage. There’s something we have to do today, but we are trying to postpone it. We need to go across the road to see Mr Ewing; we need to ask for a valuation, and see what they think of our chances of selling. Ewing’s are the local firm, and it was they who sold us the house, seven years ago. As the morning wears on we move around each other silently, avoiding conversation. The decision’s made. There’s no more to discuss.
‘I was still only a boy, still unformed, when walking into the colonel’s tent . . .’ | Extract from Conundrum

‘I was still only a boy, still unformed, when walking into the colonel’s tent . . .’ | Extract from Conundrum

I was still only a boy, still unformed, when walking into the colonel’s tent on the banks of the Tagliamento river in Venezia Giulia, I found the commanding officer of the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers rising to his feet to greet me. Yet I was entering a man’s world, the world of war and soldiery. I felt like one of those unconvincing heroines of fiction who, disguised in buskins or Hussar’s jacket, penetrate the battlefields to find glory or romance: and the colonel’s civilized gesture of welcome, to an undistinguished and unpromising reporting subaltern, seemed to me a happy omen. So it was.

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