Header overlay

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

Popular categories

Explore our library

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.
SF magazine subscribers only
Voyage in the Dark

Voyage in the Dark

Good Morning, Midnight is in fact the fourth in a series of novels that draw largely on Jean Rhys’s own life. Sasha Jansen is a lonely, ageing alcoholic who, at the instigation of a worried friend, goes to spend a recuperative fortnight in Paris, where she had lived during her brief marriage. Now she wanders the streets, ‘remembering this, remembering that’. She has been so damaged by men that when happiness is within her grasp she is unable to prevent herself seeking revenge with a futile gesture of self-destruction.
SF magazine subscribers only
A Bad Chooser of Husbands

A Bad Chooser of Husbands

Do your favourite authors have a recognizable voice, so that you can identify them from a paragraph in the same way that you identify a voice over the telephone? Angela Thirkell has just such a voice, but even so she has been out of fashion since the 1960s – partly, I suspect, because her later work had a strongly rancorous tone. I’d never heard of her until I came to weed a technical college library in the ’70s and happened upon a hardback novel with a map of Barsetshire as a frontispiece. Who was this Thirkell woman?
SF magazine subscribers only

High Life

Bad News by Edward St Aubyn is, quite simply, the best book ever written about drugs. Thomas de Quincey, Charles Baudelaire, Jean Cocteau, William Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson, Irvine Welsh and Will Self may all be writers roped together like mountaineers heading for the summit, but it is St Aubyn they will find at the top. I first came across the book about five years ago. There it was, quietly glowing away on a friend’s shelf. And from the moment I picked it up I knew it was a work of perfection. It fitted my own experience as seamlessly as a silk glove.
SF magazine subscribers only

A Kind of Redemption

I’ve been a passionate reader all my life, be it of labels on jam jars or the small print on the back of tax forms, aged copies of free newspapers left on seats on the London Underground, Peter Rabbit or Plato. Reading is more than pleasure, it’s like breathing. Generally, though, I read for aesthetic reasons (literature, to enjoy the writer’s skill), to keep up (newspapers and periodicals) or for escape (thrillers, the blacker the better). Or that was true before my mother died.
SF magazine subscribers only
Posh but Down-to-Earth

Posh but Down-to-Earth

Recently, I noticed a rather irritating poster on the Underground proclaiming: ‘You never forget your first time.’ It was an advertisement for a villa holiday company – bizarrely – but the irritation I felt (since I am not annoyed by villa holidays per se) had to do with the too obvious double entendre. In fact, one does not forget the first time that one does quite a lot of things – seeing one’s name in print, for instance, or walking along Striding Edge, that most vertiginous of paths on to the top of Helvellyn – and certainly I have never forgotten the first time I read a gardening book.
SF magazine subscribers only

Oedipus Schmoedipus

Eighty years ago Ian Suttie, a Scottish psychiatrist, wrote The Origins of Love and Hate, in which he fiercely criticized Freud’s theories. Freud saw human beings as ‘isolates wrestling with their instincts’, Suttie saw them as dreading isolation, ‘striving from the first to relate to [the] mother, and [their] future mental health turning on the success or failure of this first relationship’. Love was social rather than sexual in its biological function, thought Suttie, and was derived from a ‘self-preservation instinct rather than the genital appetite’.
SF magazine subscribers only
Made in Siberia

Made in Siberia

Every season a couple of wonderful biographies emerge whose reviews and sales might lead one to believe that they will stay bestsellers for ever. A year or two later they are in no greater demand than thousands of other backlist titles. Examples of this might be Amanda Foreman’s Georgiana or David Gilmour’s Curzon. Both were rightly acclaimed, but after the flurry of reviews, after Christmas had come and gone, they joined others on the shelves as definitive works on rather specialized subjects whose future sales will be steady, but modest. This is not to derogate the books: it is just what happens.
SF magazine subscribers only
My First Gethsemane

My First Gethsemane

Thirty-nine years ago I came to work at Heywood Hill’s bookshop in Curzon Street. Between school and Cambridge, I had worked for three months at Heffers, where Mr Reuben Heffer had cannily put me in the Science Department. It was the only part of the shop where I wouldn’t read the stock. This could hardly be called a preparation for the sophisticated carriage trade in the West End, and I had little inkling of what would be expected of me. At my interview with Handasyde Buchanan, Heywood’s long-term partner and my future boss, it appeared that he considered himself the doyen of London booksellers and that he was pleased that, like him, I had had a Classical education.
SF magazine subscribers only

Maxwell’s World

A curious thing: the New York literary world is smaller than the London literary world. It also has a strange feeling of being more old-fashioned. I was edited there by the legendary Joe Fox. I don’t think he liked me, but we would have dinner at a hotel restaurant, the last place where he could smoke in New York, and talk about great writers, including William Maxwell. Joe Fox died at his desk in Random House behind a huge pile of copies of the New York Times, cigarette on his lips.
SF magazine subscribers only
The Trouble with Idealism

The Trouble with Idealism

It was towards the end of his long life, after revolutionalizing many other aspects of design, that William Morris embarked on his ‘typographical adventure’ at the Kelmscott Press. Though it survived for less than eight years and was wound up shortly after his death in 1896, it managed to produce 53 publications, including many of his own writings and a celebrated edition of Chaucer in a highly distinctive dark, ‘Gothic’ style. Kelmscott provided the crucial impetus for the four leading private presses considered in an excellent new series from the British Library and Oak Knoll Press.
SF magazine subscribers only
Tooth and Claw

Tooth and Claw

The Red Hourglass, a debut volume by a writer called Gordon Grice, explores a fundamental premise. ‘We want the world to be an ordered room,’ its author writes, ‘but in the corner there hangs an untidy web.’ Within lurks ‘an irreducible mystery, a motiveless evil in Nature’. This was the idea that had captured the imagination of the movie director. And that was the idea that had trapped me, too, the first time I came across the book. I had picked it up from a literary editor’s review pile and started to leaf, distractedly, through it. Half an hour later, I was sitting on the floor, transfixed.
SF magazine subscribers only

Sign up to our e-newsletter

Sign up for dispatches about new issues, books and podcast episodes, highlights from the archive, events, special offers and giveaways.