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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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A Man’s Man

At first I enjoyed being the only person ever to have read The Dark of Summer. It was like coming across a deserted beach that can only be reached by boat. But then, glancing down Linklater’s exhausting bibliography (twenty-three novels, ten plays, three children’s books, six collections of short stories, three biographies and more), the thought began to niggle at me: what had happened to all those books? I instigated a search. ‘Eric Linklater?’ said one second-hand bookshop owner as he went downstairs to rummage about in his basement. ‘I should be ashamed if I didn’t have anything by him. He’s rather out of fashion these days, isn’t he?’ Another said, ‘Eric Linklater? Must have, somewhere . . . sort of middlebrow?’

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1st September 2004

Slightly Foxed Issue 3: From the Editors

Since Slightly Foxed was launched, its office has been comfortably sited in Canonbury, a quiet part of North London with leafy roads and literary associations: George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Louis MacNeice and Nancy Mitford are just a few of the writers who have lived in its Georgian and early Victorian houses – usually during periods when they were somewhat down on their luck. Since then Canonbury has come up in the world, but there are still many writers living nearby.

- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

From the editors

Waist-high in Kale

Waist-high in Kale

Tsar Alexander II was warned that Turgenev’s collection of short stories, variously translated into English as Sketches from a Hunter’s Album or A Sportsman’s Notebook, was politically subversive. He read it, nonetheless, and later said it had influenced his decision in 1861 to liberate Russia’s 40 million serfs.

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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

Fishing Fox

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

1st September 2005

Slightly Foxed Issue 7: From the Editors

Sadly, just as we were celebrating the arrival of the summer issue, we lost a member of our team. On 15 June, Jennings the cocker spaniel died peacefully in his sleep at the age of 13. We miss him greatly. He was in on the earliest beginnings of Slightly Foxed, always beside us at meetings to remind us with a yawn or a discreet whine that things had gone on too long, always good-humoured and enthusiastic. He bore his increasing deafness and loss of sight without irritability, but it became obvious this year that he was failing. His brother Pugwash, by contrast, is in rude health and, after a decent period of mourning, is now enjoying his position as top and only dog. But he lacks Jennings’s subtlety.

- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

From the editors

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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Natural the Way He Is

Natural the Way He Is

It is a fair bet to say that, for most people under the age of 50, and those who are not jazz fans, the name Louis Armstrong is one associated – if recognized at all – with the sound of his voice (or, far worse, pastiches of it) singing ‘It’s a Wonderful World’ or ‘Hello Dolly’ on the backing tracks of commercials. A dimmer memory may come of a jovial old cove appearing in the film High Society, dueting with Bing Crosby and tooting a few notes on his trumpet. Even when Louis died in 1971, few of those who genuinely mourned the loss of a great entertainer had any knowledge of his true history or musical worth.

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Pure Arcadia

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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Distant Harmonies

Recently I was given a copy of The Music at Long Verney: Twenty Stories by Sylvia Townsend Warner. It was a revelation. Years ago, when I was a struggling art student, I read and loved her novels, but I somehow failed to discover the short stories. Many had first appeared in The New Yorker, and eight collections in all were published. I began to read, and there was the gracious world of the mind that I remembered from her novels, the lush sentences with their ravishing, tumbling clauses, delicious rhythms, exquisite imagery, painterly detail, the fantastic sense of place.

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On Matters Mekong

On Matters Mekong

Scrolling idly through the SOAS Library’s subject catalogue, I must have brushed an unusual combination of keys, so activating a random function not mentioned on the options bar nor widely known to researchers. The feat has since proved impossible to repeat. But I keep trying; for it was thanks to this truly serendipitous action that up flashed a title which, for its crystal candour, can seldom have been bettered. Fish and Fish Dishes of Laos was so specific it had to be just that – a handbook and culinary guide to the fish to be found in landlocked Laos. The author was Alan Davidson, the publisher Prospect Books, the category ‘Long Loan’, and the status ‘Available’. Like a minnow into the reeds, I darted to the stacks.

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Walking Fox

Walking Fox

From Slightly Foxed, Issue 12 James Nunn www.jamesnunn.co.uk

Going West

I am next to a businessman at a formal dinner. The conversation dries up after the soup. At a loss, I ask what sort of books he enjoys. Risky, I know. Either he won’t read, ‘except on planes when I buy whatever I can find at the airport’, or his answer will be as revealing as if I had asked him to tell me his life story. I am lucky. My businessman, more interested in fiction than foreign exchange, tells me, the book junkie, of a wonderful American author of whom I am ignorant. I am eternally grateful to him and still have the scrap of paper – menu on one side, ‘Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose’, on the other – which I stuffed into my tiny bag.

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Poste-Freudian Therapy

Poste-Freudian Therapy

It is generally thought that Stella Gibbons was mocking Mary Webb’s Precious Bane when she wrote Cold Comfort Farm, but she was probably having a pop at all those purveyors of country hardship, sex, doom and slop, Hardy and Lawrence included. One can easily tire of the lush, dripping, thrusting, tragic, moist, fecund countryside, and long for a brisk young woman from the tough pavements of town like Flora Poste to come along and tidy things up a bit . . .

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Troublesome Ghosts

Troublesome Ghosts

Every morning, when the dog drags me out, we take the Church Walk behind the shops, through a wrought-iron gateway into the churchyard, passing the old half-timbered Guildhall. There, on a rock sticking out of a shrub border, is a bronze plaque of a woman with an odd gaze, her hair done up in a bun, against a background of distant hills. The plaque is a brand: Much Wenlock and this part of south-west Shropshire have become Mary Webb Country.

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Casting a Spell

Casting a Spell

Given that we’re talking in years, it is ironic that the book that stimulated this article deals with the most ephemeral entomological order, poetically described by Louis MacNeice as ‘One only day of May alive beneath the sun’. The American artist Gaylord Schanilec is illustrating and writing Mayflies of the Driftless Region, which he plans to publish in the autumn of 2005 under his Midnight Paper Sales imprint.

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