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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 . . .

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From World to World

From World to World

We are observing a group of people trying to find a log. The log is not where they left it. They have been away for some time. Now it is not where it was, and they are perturbed. It is, we gather, a long log. They need it in order to cross a marsh. Finally one of them – he is called Lok – has the bright idea of finding another log, and putting it where the old one was. His companions are deeply impressed by this. A new log is located and moved by communal effort. Now they can cross the marsh to get to where they want to go. They take it in turns to walk along the log, but one of them, an old man, falls into the water. They pull him out, but he is wet and cold, and starts shivering. This seems to trouble them much more than we might expect. We infer that being cold represents a mortal threat.

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So Far Yet So Near

So Far Yet So Near

You do not have to be a paid-up member of the Janeite club to find yourself returning repeatedly to her novels. The urge to idolize Jane Austen is understandable but (in the spirit of the author herself) careful observation from a distance may serve us better. What is remarkable about her writing is not merely the vividness of her creations but the skill with which she inclines us to enter worlds whose manners and morals are in so many respects alien to our own. I cannot be the only reader who has found himself nodding in agreement with actions and expressions of opinion which would cause ructions in today’s world. Which is no more than to say that she is a past master at getting us to suspend our disbelief – or, to put it another way, to persuade us that her world is somehow ours.

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Small Crimes, Big Consequences

Small Crimes, Big Consequences

Even the most beloved authors are not necessarily remembered for the works they themselves considered their best. Famously, Arthur Conan Doyle wrote his Sherlock Holmes stories begrudgingly, and was instead devoted to his historical fiction, in particular The White Company, a charming but somewhat mannered tale of knights in the Hundred Years’ War. Similarly, C. S. Lewis considered his little-known novel Till We Have Faces his best work. A retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth, it’s a dark and foreboding tale, a far cry from his Narnia stories or even his popular theology.

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A Shameless Old Reprobate

A Shameless Old Reprobate

In 1977 I interviewed Christopher Isherwood about his memoir, Christopher and His Kind. During the interview he said how much he regretted burning the diaries he had kept while living in Berlin in the early 1930s. Why? Because, he told me, they gave a much truer picture of his past than the two novels he based upon them. Instead of being an observer, in the diaries he appeared as a participant, cruising bars in search of ‘boys’, which was why he’d gone to Berlin in the first place. It was okay to admit this now, but in those days you simply couldn’t risk such compromising material falling into the wrong hands. So up in smoke they went.

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Marvellous Meals

Marvellous Meals

Everyone knows that in 1963 Maurice Sendak wrote a masterpiece in ten sentences (37 pages, 338 words, beginning with ‘The night Max wore his wolf suit . . .’). That was Where the Wild Things Are (see SF no. 20). A year before, though, he wrote four masterpieces in nine centimetres.

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The Smell of Lavender Water

The Smell of Lavender Water

If you, dear reader, should happen to be the wrong side of 70, should perchance have lost your life partner, should occasionally in the small hours have slippery thoughts about what life might hold in store for you, if you should ever wonder, however fleetingly, ‘what next?’ or even ‘how?’ – then maybe Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (1971) by Elizabeth Taylor is not for you.

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Casus Belli

Casus Belli

War is a good subject for students of human nature. You might even write a book about it. Barbara Tuchman did, calling it August 1914. An encyclopaedic account of the opening month of the First World War, it was published in 1962 and sold over a million copies. It won the Pulitzer Prize. It was written by a woman. There had never been anything quite like it.

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Through All the Flummery | Slightly Foxed Last Orders

Through All the Flummery | Slightly Foxed Last Orders

Season’s greetings from SF HQ, where we’re warming mince pies, stock-taking and tidying-up as we prepare to shut up shop for the Christmas break. The last orders for the year have now been dispatched and the office will be closed from 2 p.m. on Monday 23 December until 9.30 a.m. on Friday 3 January 2025.

When I Was a Little Boy | A Child’s Troubles

When I Was a Little Boy | A Child’s Troubles

Only once in every year did I ardently wish to have brothers and sisters – on Christmas Eve. For all I would have cared they could have packed up and flown away again on Christmas Day after the roast goose and dumplings, the red cabbage and the celery salad. I would gladly have given up my own helping of goose and eaten giblets instead if only I did not have to be alone on the evening of the twenty-fourth of December. They could have had half my presents. And what truly glorious presents they were!

‘Memory and recollection are mysterious powers, and recollection is the more mysterious and puzzling of the two . . .’

‘Memory and recollection are mysterious powers, and recollection is the more mysterious and puzzling of the two . . .’

Erich Kästner, journalist, screenwriter and author of the immortal children’s book Emil and the Detectives, was born at the end of the nineteenth century in Dresden – that ‘wonderful city full of art and history’ which was razed to the ground by the Allies in 1945.

Memory and recollection are mysterious powers | When I Was a Little Boy Extract

Memory and recollection are mysterious powers | When I Was a Little Boy Extract

Memory and recollection are mysterious powers, and recollection is the more mysterious and puzzling of the two. For the memory has only to do with our heads. How much is seven times fifteen? And little Paul shouts promptly, ‘A hundred and five!’ He has learned it and his head has retained it. Or it has forgotten it, in which case little Paul cries, ‘A hundred and fifteen!’ Whether we know this or that correctly or incorrectly, or whether we have forgotten it and must reckon up anew, good memory and bad memory reside in our heads. The pigeon-holes for all the things we have ever learned are there. I imagine they are like the drawers in a cupboard or a chest of drawers. They often stick when you try to pull them out. Sometimes there’s nothing in them, and sometimes there’s the wrong thing. And sometimes they won’t pull out at all. Then they and we are ‘as if nailed down’, as the saying goes. Our memories are either large or small chests of drawers. In my own head, for instance, the chest of drawers is rather small. The drawers are only half full, but they’re fairly tidy. When I was a little boy my chest of drawers looked quite different. In those days my little top storey was a real lumber room.

Sprouts and Parsnip Wine | ‘Early one morning, late in July, the villagers of ‘crack-brained Brensham’ woke to a remarkable spectacle . . .’

Sprouts and Parsnip Wine | ‘Early one morning, late in July, the villagers of ‘crack-brained Brensham’ woke to a remarkable spectacle . . .’

Early one morning, late in July, the villagers of ‘crack-brained Brensham’ woke to a remarkable spectacle. There amid the customary colours of furze and wheat was a seven-acre field that ‘had suddenly become tinctured with the colour of Mediterranean skies’. Nothing like it had ever happened before, so that the villagers caught their breath at the sight of this miracle: a great, vivid patch of cerulean ‘so clear and pure that it made one think of eyes or skies’.

Letters, Notes, Diaries & Journals

Letters, Notes, Diaries & Journals

Greetings from No. 53 Hoxton Square, where the sun is shining through the office windows onto our desks as we open this week’s correspondence from our readers all over the world. We have been fortunate over the years to have received many delightful missives from readers far and wide in various forms, though nothing cheers us quite as much as an old-fashioned letter.

‘Muriel was at a crossroads. Something would have to be done, but what?’ | The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerly

‘Muriel was at a crossroads. Something would have to be done, but what?’ | The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerly

Diana Petre and her twin sisters grew up in Barnes, South London, in the care of an elderly housekeeper, having been abandoned in 1912 by their mother, the enigmatic Mrs Muriel Perry, whose real name and true identity were a mystery. After an absence of ten years, Muriel reappeared and took charge of her children, with disastrous results.

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A Charity Prize Draw for BookTrust

A Charity Prize Draw for BookTrust

This year, the well-loved literary magazine Slightly Foxed is celebrating twenty years in print . . . here we are, hoping to mark our twentieth birthday year by raising up to £20,000 for another good bookish cause: the brilliant BookTrust – the national charity dedicated to getting children reading. Each year BookTrust reaches millions of children with books, resources and support for families, to get every child reading regularly and by choice.