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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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Life in Our Hands | New from the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

It is three o’clock in the morning, ‘the very bottom of time’ as Pamela Bright describes it, and her ward is filled with wounded men. So overstretched is she that she barely knows where she is, but as her gut-wrenchingly vivid account progresses, we begin to understand that she is in a Casualty Clearing Station attached to the British Second Army in Normandy, which had landed a week after D-Day in June 1944. Pamela is one of the young nurses working heroically to tend to the wounded in impossible conditions a few miles from the front line.

15th February 2024

‘I am always impressed . . .’

‘Thank you for the wonderful books you’ve sent and for the ones I’ve added to my collection from the blacklist. A word of appreciation to the quality of paper and binding – I move around a lot and my SF…

- R. Susan, RI, USA

From readers

Celtic Charm and Champagne | Empress of Ireland

‘The Empress of Ireland is not enjoyable because it does something cliched like “capturing a lost world”; it entertains wildly because the author, purely by chance, encountered a truly original character that even the finest novelist could not have invented.’ – Gustav Temple, The Chap The subtitle to this delicious book is ‘A Chronicle of an Unusual Friendship’, and it would indeed be difficult to imagine two more unlikely companions than its author and his subject, the 80-year-old gay Irish film-maker Brian Desmond Hurst.

The Empress of Ireland | Part III: London

I arrived at Kinnerton Street one morning to find an extremely tall man standing on his own in the front room warming himself in front of the fire. He did not introduce himself but launched into an incomprehensible monologue. ‘I had dinner with her again last night. At the Ritz. We had the most delicious lamb cutlets. Served pink. She loves them pink like that. And a bottle of Léoville-Poyferre 1961 – do you approve? A whole bottle – not a half.’

A Countryman’s Summer Notebook Extract | ‘The Simple Life’

‘In practice it’s not so easy,’ somebody said, ‘to live simply.’ We were sitting in a little mill house among paddocks, having supper with the sun in our eyes: it shone straight through the open door. Copper pans on the west-facing wall blazed like some hero’s arms. The hay field outside had a rosy crest of sorrel, and the flowering grassheads glittered. Then the rook appeared, stalking up the path. It was a tame one, rescued after a farmers’ battue, found lying in the grass, its flight feathers shot away on one side. He stood peering in at the door. ‘Here I am.’ Meet Joe.

A Cab at the Door Last 50! | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

Greetings from Hoxton Square where we are gearing up for the arrival of the summer offerings from Tracey and the team at Smith Settle. Whilst floor-sweeping, shelf-shuffling and stock-checking, we noticed that we have just one box (50 copies) of our smart little Slightly Foxed paperback edition of V. S. Pritchett’s A Cab at the Door left in stock. We won’t be reprinting this title so if you are yet to add this classic memoir to your Slightly Foxed collection, please take this last opportunity to do so!

Supper with the sun in our eyes | A Countryman’s Summer Notebook

Greetings from Hoxton Square where we have already begun posting out pre-orders of Adrian Bell’s A Countryman’s Summer Notebook. In this, the third volume of our seasonal quartet, Bell takes us into the summer countryside, to smell the may blossom in hedges which ‘suddenly become cliffs of white’, to linger in quiet churches, wander through country towns, and hear the voices of the craftsmen and women, the farmers and farm labourers whose lives are rooted in the Suffolk soil.

Michael Holroyd | Basil Street Blues Extract

Well-known for his frank biographies of such controversial figures as Augustus John and Lytton Strachey, Michael Holroyd teases out the story – or rather stories – of his own distinctly problematic family in his delightful and original memoir, Basil Street Blues.

‘Spicy titbits and an infectious ebullience’ | From the Slightly Foxed Archives

Greetings from Hoxton Square, where we’ve had a pleasingly busy week catching up with the many orders that came in over the Easter break for which, as ever, we send you our great thanks.

‘Sauntered homeward by unfrequented ways . . . ’ | A Countryman’s Spring Notebook

Greetings from Hoxton Square, where we’ve been enjoying the longer days and lighter evenings and drawing breath after the welcome flurry of orders that followed the publication of our spring issue. Slightly Foxed Issue 81 should by now have dropped through subscribers’ letterboxes around the world and we do hope you’ve enjoyed it, wherever you are.

Singularly precocious, egocentric and thoroughly original . . . | Dear Little Dodie Smith

We’ve been having something of a Dodie Smith moment at Slightly Foxed in recent months, what our reissue of Look Back with Love, the recent National Theatre revival of Dear Octopus, and our latest podcast, with special guest: Dodie’s biographer Valerie Grove.

Daniel Finkelstein wins The Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2023

Slightly Foxed and The Biographers’ Club are delighted to announce that the winner of the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2023, chosen by judges Philip Eade, Sue Gaisford and Clare Mulley is Hitler, Stalin, Mum & Dad by Daniel Finkelstein. Hitler, Stalin, Mum & Dad is a deeply moving, personal and at times horrifying memoir about Finkelstein’s parents’ experiences at the hands of the two genocidal dictators of the twentieth century. It is a story of persecution; survival; and the consequences of totalitarianism told with the almost unimaginable bravery of two ordinary families shining through.⁠

Coppery haws and scarlet hips | The girl who grew up to be Rosemary Sutcliff

We much enjoyed reading Slightly Foxed contributor Laura Freeman’s spread on Rosemary Sutcliff in The Times a few weekends ago. We feel bound to confess that the article was inspired by another publisher’s forthcoming paperback edition of Blue Remembered Hills but, as Laura herself wrote as a footnote to her piece, ‘I feel a sneak for saying it but this isn’t the prettiest of editions and there is a nicer one published by Slightly Foxed in clothbound covers.’ ‘Either way’, she goes on to say, ‘Blue Remembered Hills is a perfect period piece: beautifully written, brave, forbearing and sublimely entertaining.’

Scrag end, Bovril and ancient eggs | My Grandmothers and I

Diana Holman-Hunt’s childhood was spent between two wildly contrasting households. One, in Melbury Road, Kensington, belonged to her paternal grandmother, William Holman Hunt’s eccentric widow Edith, known to Diana as ‘Grand’. The other, on the edge of the Sussex marshes, was the home of her mother’s parents, Grandmother and Grandfather Freeman.

‘Ah, good morning my pet,’ said Grand . . .

Grand was my father’s mother and Grandpa Holman-Hunt’s widow. I knew he was the famous Pre-Raphaelite painter and that she was also known as Mrs H-H. ‘Well, fancy you, going to pay a visit all alone,’ said Hannah, dusting a wooden chair for me to sit on. ‘Careful dear, you don’t want to crease that nice new dress.’ ‘Paying a visit is what Grand calls going to the lavatory, except she calls it the convenience. Unmentionables are socks and drawers.’

Spring has sprung at Slightly Foxed

Greetings from Hoxton Square where we’re ignoring our frozen toes and drippy noses, blocking out the hum of the boiler and insisting that it is now, officially, spring. Issue 81 of Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly (the first of our 20th birthday year!) is published today and it’s brimming with lively recommendations to take your reading off the beaten track.