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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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From Cheltenham to Lochiel

From Cheltenham to Lochiel

Rereading The Flight of the Heron, I recaptured something of the uncomplicated delight and excitement that I had felt first timeround. The story of Ewen Cameron of Ardroy, a minor chieftain of the Cameron clan, his part in the ill-fated campaign to put Charles Edward Stuart on the throne, and his difficult but growing friendship with an English redcoat officer, Keith Windham, had not lost its power to stir.

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Sound Nonsense

Sound Nonsense

The words rolled out, natural and clear, and I listened with new ears and understanding. Enlightenment had finally come. Passages spoken aloud in an Irish accent, by someone who loved the prose enough to commit long passages to memory, released the book’s power. Its beauty had been unlocked not by a literary intellectual, but by a half-tight man in a cheap suit standing at the bar of a Dublin pub. Finnegans Wake was revealed as a work of sound rather than sense, a form of high falutin, Gaelic, literary rap. Ireland talking in her sleep. It was as if Brian had taken me by the elbow, and guided me into this particular tavern to receive a final, Celtic benediction.

SF magazine subscribers only

15th January 2012

‘Look Back with Love is a lovely, lovely, lovely book . . . ’

If you are feeling miserable, it will cheer you up, if you are feeling ill (as I was when it arrived) it will make you feel better and, if you are already well and happy, it will make you even more so.

- Random Jottings

‘If the rules of ‘Desert Island Discs’ allow a periodical instead of a book . . .’

‘I'm not sure if the rules of 'Desert Island Discs' allow a periodical instead of a book; but if they do – and no doubt the people at Hoxton Square could arrange delivery by homing albatross – I'd go for a subscription to Slightly Foxed and ration myself, very strictly, to an article a week . . . And I know I'd still read it in one go the day it arrived.’

- Tim Mackintosh-Smith

‘The arrival of a new issue of Slightly Foxed makes me drop everything . . .’

‘The arrival of a new issue of Slightly Foxedmakes me drop everything. I read it from cover to cover and it immediately sends me off to order a number of the books that it features.’

- Alexander McCall Smith

‘Always unputdownable . . .’

‘Sometimes deep, sometimes surprising, often eccentric, but always unputdownable.’

- Posy Simmonds

20th May 2009

‘Beautifully produced . . .’

‘Absolutely beautifully produced.’

- BBC Radio 4 Today

From readers

‘I know it’s planned, but it feels fortuitous and that’s quite an art . . .’

‘A quarterly box of delights - always something unexpected to excite the taste buds of the bookish. I know it's planned, but it feels fortuitous and that's quite an art.’

- Paul Routledge

20th May 2009

Time Out

‘Packed with anecdotes, reminiscences and essays about books, writers and the trade. If you love books you'll love Slightly Foxed.’

- Time Out

From the press

Before the Sun Set

This wonderful recreation of a time and a climate of mind – a hundred years ago, one realizes, startled – is not just an evocation of place but also of the child’s eye view. A Late Beginner ranks quite simply with the greatest accounts of how it is to be a child, to see with that strange, skewed, uncontaminated vision.

Soames’s Second Coming

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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Anna and the Bazooka

I can drop Anna Kavan’s name among the most literary of my friends and their brows furrow and they confess that, even though thirteen of her books are still in print, and a second biography of her life, A Stranger on Earth, by Jeremy Reed, came out this spring, they’ve never heard of her, let alone read a word by her. Anna Kavan wasn’t her real name. She was born Helen Woods but changed her name to Helen Ferguson. Then, when she married, she became Helen Edmunds, but after her divorce (or was there a divorce? Everything about the woman is so mysterious) she destroyed all her diaries and papers, and invented a new birth date, a new physical appearance and a new literary style.

SF magazine subscribers only

All Washed Up

All Washed Up

Many years ago, when I was in my early twenties, I lived in Copenhagen where I was registered with the Foreign Ministry as correspondent for The Times. But I made my living washing dishes. The paper paid by the line and used so little of my copy that I was forced to find illegal work as a scullion in one of the city’s less elegant restaurants. And it was during this time, morbidly attracted by the title, that I found a copy of Down and Out in Paris and London.

‘Tombs, dear. Where’s your other sock?’

‘Tombs, dear. Where’s your other sock?’

No one told me that the pyramids had been one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, but they were certainly the primal wonder of mine. From early on they exercised an oddly persistent fascination.They could not, it seemed, be taken for granted, like hills and trees and houses. Approached along the pyramid road they got larger and larger and larger until they filled up one half of the sky. It took a long while to ride lurchingly round the Great Pyramid on a camel, and from no angle could their stupendousness be made a thing of nought. They were made of square yellow blocks, exactly like sugar lumps, but higher than I was.

Leaning Fox

Leaning Fox

From Slightly Foxed, Issue 25 James Nunn www.jamesnunn.co.uk

1st January 2009

Exotic Subscribers

Businesslike people sometimes ask us about our ‘reader profile’ – who, they wonder, would be a ‘typical Slightly Foxed subscriber’. We find this impossible to answer, except to say that you all clearly love reading and have shown yourselves to be an exceptionally nice bunch of people – courteous, generous, loyal, and with a telling turn of phrase, judging by your letters.