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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Hearing Distant Thunder

A friend at college many decades ago was the daughter of a respected Kensington GP who was deeply involved in the history of the area. On one occasion when I was visiting she mentioned that her father was discreetly relieved at the recent death of a particularly eccentric and demanding patient, a novelist who, as a leading light also of the local history society, had had to be treated with especial tact. ‘Who was she?’ I asked. ‘Oh, she’s mildly famous, I think, but you’ve probably not heard of her. I wouldn’t have except that she’s been the bane of Daddy’s life. Rachel Ferguson.’
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Episode 27: Dr Wiener’s Library

Episode 27: Dr Wiener’s Library

Anthony Wells worked at The Wiener Holocaust Library in London for a decade. In this episode he leads the Slightly Foxed editors into the history of the library, which holds one of the most extensive archives on the Holocaust and the Nazi era. We travel to Germany, Amsterdam, New York and Tel Aviv, but it is people rather than places that the library remembers with its annals of personal stories. Dr Alfred Wiener, a German Jew who fought in the First World War, was one of the first to note the rise of the Nazi Party, and he began to assemble an archive of information in order to undermine their activities. From downfall by documentation in the Nuremberg Trial to a tracing service made up of millions of records, we learn how The Wiener Library ensures that those who disappeared are not forgotten.
37 minutes

Murder and Walnut Cake

‘For my son Tom. Since it was a vain attempt to match his prodigious literary output that got me into this situation in the first place.’ This slightly gushy (and therefore untypical) dedication at the front of Mrs Malory Wonders Why was the first clue I had as to how and why Hazel Holt created Sheila Malory. Thank goodness she did. Her stories about a middle-aged widow who solves murder mysteries saw me through a month in 2017 when two of my sons, simultaneously and both on the other side of the world, were seriously ill. Similarly, in March 2020 when it became clear that a pandemic was unavoidable and we had better hunker down or perish, I hunted out my store of Mrs Malories again. Everyone has an author whose work they turn to when it seems like the end of the world as we know it, and Hazel Holt is mine. She is something of a mystery herself, though.
SF magazine subscribers only

Growing Pains

An annual pre-Christmas treat for me is discovering which books have impressed the great and the good of the literary world over the previous twelve months. The lists in the heavyweight papers invariably give me two or three ideas for spending the book tokens I know are coming my way. One year Ian McEwan praised John Williams’s Stoner, which I found so strong that I didn’t hesitate a few years later to follow up another of McEwan’s recommendations, the more so as he wasn’t alone in picking it. At least two other contributors had been struck by Reunion, a novella of under a hundred pages written by Fred Uhlman, a German-Jewish painter and writer. When it was first published in 1971 Reunion went unnoticed; and though it was a little more successful when reissued a few years later, it wasn’t until a further reissue in 2015 that it was recognized as the masterpiece it is.
22nd January 2021

Slightly Foxed Editors’ Diary • 22 January 2021

Lovely though Christmas is, I must admit I also enjoy January. There’s something very satisfying about taking down the Christmas tree, tidying the house, finishing all the leftovers in the larder, putting up a calendar for the new year, opening a fresh diary and generally taking stock before spring arrives. This year, during our third lockdown, these small routines seem more important than ever. There’s an austere beauty too in the winter landscape. The sheep have cropped the grass to reveal every dip and curve in the land, the bracken has died back and the trees, now without even their tattered autumn leaves, have become living sculptures of twisted branches reaching into the sky. The winter light, low as dusk approaches, transforms the landscape and spotlights here a ridge, there a cleft in the valley.
- Gail Pirkis & Steph Allen
From the editors
22nd December 2020

Slightly Foxed Editors’ Diary • 22 December 2020

The first wave of Christmas cards has started to arrive: ‘Hope you’re staying safe’; ‘All quiet here – only one case in the village’. News of weddings postponed, of holidays cancelled, but also of new babies, of violin exams passed with distinction, of Zoom book groups and lockdown exercise sessions. The end of the kitchen table is piled with packs of Christmas cards still waiting to be sent, but this year there’s a terrible hitch. We can’t find our address book, which has our whole lives in it.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
Episode 26: A Winter’s Tale

Episode 26: A Winter’s Tale

In this seasonal episode, the Slightly Foxed team are guided through a snowstorm of winter writing over twelve centuries by the literary critic and author of Weatherland, Alexandra Harris. The tour takes us from Anglo-Saxon mead halls and monsters to Renaissance bodily humours, then on through cool, translucent Enlightenment weather into the dark cloud of the nineteenth century and beyond. We visit frost-fair carnivals on the frozen Thames with Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, brave the Brontës’ wild moorland, stay steamed up indoors with Jane Austen, sink into Dickens’s pea-soupers and see in the ‘year’s midnight’ with John Donne as we listen to a winter’s tale through literature.
43 minutes
27th November 2020

Slightly Foxed Editors’ Diary • 27 November 2020

I’ve always loved the small room I work in. It’s snug and light and looks out into the branches of a big sycamore in the next-door garden. It’s felt like a haven, a place where I can shut the door, settle down and quietly get on with things. Until now, that is. The more lockdown continues and the more pressingly my little room demands my presence, the more hostile I feel to it. It’s like an old friend who’s suddenly become unreasonably demanding. That’s because it’s where my computer is and now most essentials of life seem to have gone online – food, clothes and present shopping, work meetings, events, doctor’s appointments, friendly drinks – it’s all become virtual.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
Episode 25: A Writer’s Territory

Episode 25: A Writer’s Territory

The Scottish nature writer Jim Crumley takes the Slightly Foxed team on a tour of literary landscapes, from the lochs of the Trossachs and the mountainous Cairngorms to Aldo Leopold’s sand county in Wisconsin and Barry Lopez’s Arctic. Together they trace the chain of writers who have influenced Jim, from Robert Burns and Wordsworth to Thoreau and Walt Whitman, and see nature through the eyes of his hero, the great Scottish naturalist and photographer Seton Gordon. They discuss how folklore has demonized the wolf while Jim believes its reintroduction could hugely benefit the ecology of the Scottish landscape. And finally they venture off the beaten track with this month’s wide-ranging reading recommendations.
40 minutes
Sprouts and Parsnip Wine | From the Slightly Foxed archives

Sprouts and Parsnip Wine | From the Slightly Foxed archives

Greetings from Slightly Foxed HQ. We’d like to reassure all our dear readers that we are dispatching books and goods safely during this time, so please do place orders as usual. Post is taking a little longer to arrive, both in the UK and overseas, but we endeavour to provide you with good reading as soon as possible. We are, as always, very grateful for your support. Speaking of good reading, and to bring some sunshine to this misty November day, we’re escaping to the countryside in the latest free article from the archive, and enjoying parsnip wine with Sarah Perry. Sarah’s article was published in Slightly Foxed Issue 58, and also appears as the preface to our edition of The Blue Field by John Moore. We do hope you’ll enjoy it.
Rosemary Sutcliff | The Lantern Bearers

Rosemary Sutcliff | The Lantern Bearers

We were delighted to publish two new titles in our Slightly Foxed Cubs series of highly collectable classic children’s books last month: Frontier Wolf and The Lantern Bearers by Rosemary Sutcliff. Sutcliff’s four great novels set during the last years of the Roman occupation of Britain, The Eagle of the Ninth, The Silver Branch, Frontier Wolf and The Lantern Bearers (winner of the 1959 Carnegie Prize), tell the story of several generations of the Aquila family, from the Empire’s glory days to its final withdrawal, weakened by increasing pressure from Saxon raiders and internal power struggles at home. Though most of her books were written primarily for children, the flesh-and-blood reality of her characters, her convincing plots and her brilliant reimagining of everyday life in a remote and mysterious Britain have always attracted adult readers too. They have been difficult to find for some time and we’re delighted to be reissuing them with their original illustrations.

These Old Bones

A few days before my birth my father returned from an Arctic expedition. He’d been away for several months on Svalbard – a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, halfway between continental Norway and the North Pole – exploring the glaciers, fjords and mountains east of Ny-Alesund, earth’s most northerly civilian settlement at 78° 55’ N. It was night and raining hard when he got back. From Svalbard he’d flown down to Tromsø, then Luton, then caught several trains and finally a bus to Penclawdd, a village in south Wales. My mother, sitting by the window, saw him walking up the shining road, pack on his back. Once home he was amazed to see how pregnant she was, how round her belly.
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