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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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Guilty Pleasures

More often than not, a shelf of books is a statement about the person we wish to be. We carefully arrange the titles so our friends will gain a favourable impression of us, thinking that we are cultured, sensitive, politically aware or part of the rebellious avant-garde. Meanwhile, the books we really enjoy, our guilty pleasures, are hid­den from sight. It’s nice to know that not much has changed in 500 years. Apparently, scholars in Ming-dynasty China did much the same. The books on display in their studies were the Confucian clas­sics they had been forced to read to gain high positions in the civil service, while the books they really enjoyed were hidden under their mattresses. And these, quite often, were pulp detective novels.
SF magazine subscribers only
Read, then Cook

Read, then Cook

‘If you can read, you can cook.’ This was the simple, revolutionary philosophy behind Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961 and 1970), written by Julia Child, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle. Even with sixty years’ hindsight, the book’s lasting success is remark­able. In two volumes and running to well over a thousand pages of precise technical French cuisine it was launched on a nation of home cooks who knew little about la belle France, yet it became a runaway best-seller and catapulted one of its authors to fame.
SF magazine subscribers only
Lark, Hare, Stone

Lark, Hare, Stone

Memories of the British Empire may be receding around the world, but they live on in Ireland, the first and closest of Britain’s colonies. It is not hard to see why. For centuries all the techniques that would eventually be deployed to subdue various other peoples were initiated there: armed force, mass slaughter, the theft of land, economic and racial bullying, the suppression of language, enslavement, starvation. Then, as they cut their losses, the British played their final card – partition.
SF magazine subscribers only
A Tale of Two Villages

A Tale of Two Villages

For many people in the countryside, life just after the Second World War had not changed so very much from a hundred years before. When I was a young boy in the 1950s our family lived in a small farmhouse in mid-Wales, a couple of miles from the nearest village. We had no mains water or electricity; water came from a well through a hand pump in the kitchen; electricity was provided by a generator – when that burned out one night in November we relied on candles and oil lamps for the whole winter. There was no bathroom, only a tin bath hung on the kitchen door, and an outside privy. Neighbouring farms were much the same, and families scratched a living from the sheep dotted on the surrounding hills. The children spoke Welsh and English and sang Welsh songs on the school bus. Most people went to Chapel on Sunday. It all seemed perfectly normal and likely to last forever.
SF magazine subscribers only
Food without Shame | From the Slightly Foxed archives

Food without Shame | From the Slightly Foxed archives

‘Food is life, and Laurie Colwin served hers up with jokes and trivia, delightful diversions and strange segues’ Greetings from Hoxton Square, where we’re busy preparing a feast of good reading for the summer quarter: the new issue of Slightly Foxed magazine will be rolling off the presses next week, as well as the latest limited-edition memoir, Over to Candleford & Candleford Green by Flora Thompson. To fortify readers meantime, we have selected a delicious morsel from the archives to share with you this weekend. We were delighted to learn that Olivia Potts was shortlisted for the Fortum & Mason Food and Drink Awards 2022 for her food writing in Slightly Foxed, so we’re serving up her piece on Laurie Colwin, the original ‘writer in the kitchen’.
Murder, Miracles and Myanmar

Murder, Miracles and Myanmar

As I had expected, I found the famous murder trials edited by Miss F. Tennyson Jesse on the shelves of the Law Library of the University of Victoria on Vancouver Island, but I was pleasantly surprised to discover a dozen more of her books in the main collection. It is a very young university – a mere sixty years old – and it replaced Victoria College, which itself had absorbed the Normal School, as the teacher training institute was originally known, and naturally took over their libraries. Presumably the young women preparing to be junior school teachers in the 1920s and ’30s enjoyed Jesse’s novels and plays, and so obviously did their instructors and the librarians, who of course make the real decisions about library purchases.
SF magazine subscribers only
Last of the Swallows

Last of the Swallows

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the perfect happiness of progeny is achieved only in the absence of their parents. As such circumstances are normally attended by certain obvious practical difficulties and disadvantages, they are to be found less in daily life than in fiction. In the twelve books of the Swallows and Amazons series, Arthur Ransome is ingenious in providing good reasons for keeping their elders and betters out of the revels of the Walker, Blackett and Callum children. In the seventh of the series he is at his most adept in placing Commander Walker in the wings but off stage until the precise moment when he is needed at the climax of the tale.
SF magazine subscribers only
1st June 2022

Slightly Foxed Issue 74: From the Editors

Summer is here and the square outside has come alive again. There are people walking their dogs or enjoying the sunshine at tables outside the café opposite the office. It’s a peaceful scene, but it’s impossible to forget that far away though ever-present is this year’s ugly backdrop of the war in Ukraine, not to mention the violence and suppression of free speech in so many parts of the world. We’ve never taken ourselves too seriously at Slightly Foxed, seeing it as essentially a place where readers can relax, enjoy good writing and, we hope, have a laugh occasionally. But in these deeply worrying and isolating times, it’s the comforting sense of fellowship and connection through books that readers tell us they get from Slightly Foxed which seems especially important.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
16th May 2022

‘It is a beautiful place to be transported to’

‘Flora is “Laura” in the retelling and with a keen eye for observing nature and beauty, Flora Thompson renders an exacting yet not too sentimental picture of what life was like for the rural poor. Struggling to make ends meet, yet happy in enjoying the simple pleasures of life, Lark Rise is an intimate and detailed social history of life in those times . . . It is a beautiful place to be transported to and though the last page of the book brought tears to my eyes, I will leave it to you, to find out why.’ 
- Bag Full of Books
From readers
Episode 41: Barbara Pym and Other Excellent Women

Episode 41: Barbara Pym and Other Excellent Women

Paula Byrne, author of The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym, and Lucy Scholes, critic, Paris Review columnist and editor at McNally Editions, join the Slightly Foxed team to plumb the depths and scale the peaks of Barbara Pym’s writing, life and loves. From Nazi Germany to the African Institute; from London’s bedsit land to parish halls; from unrequited love affairs with unsuitable men to an epistolary friendship with Philip Larkin; and from rejection by Jonathan Cape to overnight success via the TLS, we trace Pym’s life through her novels, visiting the Bodleian and Boots lending libraries along the way. There’s joy in Some Tame Gazelle, loneliness in Quartet in Autumn, and humour and all human experience in between, with excellent women consistently her theme.
57 minutes

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