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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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Glimpses of Paradise

Glimpses of Paradise

In the early 1970s, as a young man new to London, I visited the Tate Gallery for the first time. The gallery wasn’t very full on a spring weekday morning, but one middle-aged couple came into the room where I was standing in front of a picture. Obviously, they were intent on doing the whole gallery at a brisk pace as they moved diagonally across the floor, glancing from side to side, like pigeons looking for food. Near the doorway, the woman halted to looked at a painting. She read the label out loud, ‘A Hilly Scene. Samuel Palmer,’ then stood back, and said, ‘My goodness, but it’s so small.’ And then they hurried off into the next room, perhaps to comfort themselves with some huge Victorian landscape.
SF magazine subscribers only
Giving Pain a Voice

Giving Pain a Voice

A lone doctor hares down a country lane in his Land Rover, his thumb jammed on the horn to warn the oncoming traffic that he’s not stopping. A woodman’s been pinned to the ground on a remote hillside by a falling tree and every second counts. Even at the start of A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor (1967), we are given an inkling of what makes Dr Sassall an exceptional GP. He had his thumb on the horn partly, he explains, so that the man under the tree might hear it and know he is on his way. Dr Sassall understands that even when the immediate danger is physical, his patients need him to keep their minds in mind. A good doctor treats the whole of his patient, not just his wounds.
An Obscure Form of Magic

An Obscure Form of Magic

I’ve just read Party Going (1939), Henry Green’s comic and melancholic masterpiece, for the third or fourth time, and I’m still not sure how to convey its complex flavour. It’s a fantastically busy and exuberant novel, in which nothing really happens. (The major events include: an old lady picking up a dead pigeon and subsequently feeling ill; a beautiful young woman having a bath; a servant getting a kiss from a stranger.) It’s at once so beautifully written that I want to quote the whole thing, and so eccentrically stylized that it isn’t easy to find a quotable line. (Green was intolerant of standard English grammar and syntax; witness for example his take-’em-or-leave-’em approach to articles, as in the novel’s bizarre opening sentence: ‘Fog was so dense, bird that had been disturbed went flat into a balustrade and slowly fell, dead, at her feet.’) It’s an effervescent comedy of manners, set almost exclusively among members of the English upper class – and yet its most remarkable quality is an anguished sense of human suffering.
SF magazine subscribers only
The Smell of the Greasepaint

The Smell of the Greasepaint

When the great actor-turned-director Michael Blakemore died in December last year, aged 95, his obituarist on the BBC reminded listeners that, as well as being the collaborator of choice for the play wrights Michael Frayn and Peter Nichols, the guiding hand behind A Day in the Death of Joe Egg and Noises Off, a double Tony-award winner for Kiss Me Kate and Copenhagen, the almost-head of the National and the actual and much-fêted head of both Glasgow Citizens and the Lyric Hammersmith, he was a gifted and iconoclastic author. Personally, the commentator said, his favourite book about theatre was Blakemore’s Stage Blood (2013), a coruscating, vengeful memoir of the author’s five years as an associate director at the then nascent National Theatre.
SF magazine subscribers only
Accentuating the Positive

Accentuating the Positive

According to my journal I first read Molly Hughes’s memoir A London Child of the 1870s in October 2005, ‘a record of Islington life so charming and droll I’m puzzled as to why I’d not come across it before’. I might not have come across it then either had my wife not given me a copy, just reissued by Persephone Books in its appealing dove-grey livery with William Morris endpapers. It was a perfect choice for someone obsessed by Victorian London in general and Victorian Islington in particular. To my delight the author and her family had lived at No. 1 Canonbury Park North, an address about five minutes’ walk from where I write this. Their house is no longer standing, though the references to Upper Street, Essex Road and Highbury New Park sound a welcoming refrain, and such is the peculiar immediacy of the writing that it takes no very great leap of imagination to see an organ-grinder on the pavement, or a child bowling a hoop, or a tram upon the Holloway Road.
SF magazine subscribers only
Golden Fire

Golden Fire

I write these words, appropriately enough, in The Woolpack – the Slad pub that once claimed Laurie Lee as its most famous patron – with a pint of cider at my elbow. From one window, the view dips down into a valley, and you can see a path that leads into Stroud, where Lee was born in 1914. From the other, the churchyard, where he is buried beneath the words ‘He lies in the valley he loved’, is just visible. The cider I am drinking is, inevitably, pressed from local apples: ‘golden fire, wine of wild orchids and of that valley and that time and of Rosie’s burning cheeks’. It feels, as it often does in The Woolpack, as if the connections with the past, those generations before me who called this place home, are tangible ones, worn into the dark, musty, cider-soaked fabric of the place.
The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerley

The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerley

‘“It was Uncle who was your father,” she said.’ So begins SF Edition No. 33: The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerley, Diana Petre’s utterly unselfpitying and often very funny account of what must be one of the oddest childhoods on record. Diana and her twin sisters were abandoned in 1912 by their mother, the enigmatic Mrs Muriel Perry, whose real name and true identity were a mystery. After an absence of ten years, Muriel reappeared and took charge of her children, with disastrous results. For the girls, one of the highlights of their isolated lives were visits from a kindly man they knew as ‘Uncle Bodger’. In fact, as Muriel finally revealed, he was their father, Roger Ackerley.
21st August 2020

Slightly Foxed Editors’ Diary • 21 August 2020

It’s true that I’m writing this in Highbury, but mentally I’m in Suffolk. We came back yesterday from a week’s family holiday, and after months of being confined to London and seeing very little of our grandchildren, I’m finding it hard to make the transition. In my mind’s eye I’m still on the harbourside at Walberswick grasping the back of my 7-year-old grandson’s T-shirt as he crouches above the water, his small body tense with excitement as he strains over the edge to see if there’s anything in the net he’s dangling into the murky depths below. ‘Shall I pull it up now?’ ‘Well, wait a little bit, you’ve only just looked.’ ‘But there’s something in it. I know there is. I can see it!’ We peer down. Something seems to be moving, and yes! Oh joy! ‘Granny, it’s a crab! It’s huge. It’s gigantic. Quick, come and look!’
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
J is for Juster, Norton | From the Slightly Foxed archives

J is for Juster, Norton | From the Slightly Foxed archives

‘If a rainbow ever fell to earth and became a book it would be The Phantom Tollbooth (1961) by Norton Juster. It is a thing of light, and wonder, and beauty.’ In this week’s free article from the archives, we welcome you to Dictionopolis, the realm of words ruled by King Azaz in Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth. You’ll find an extract in the newsletter, together with a link to read the full article by Rohan Candappa from Slightly Foxed Issue 29. We do hope you enjoy travelling beyond the tollbooth.
Episode 22: Independent Spirit

Episode 22: Independent Spirit

Small but discerning, choosing passion over fashion, Little Toller Books shares an independent spirit with Slightly Foxed. Jon Woolcott joins us from this publishing house based in a converted old dairy in Dorset, and charts the rise from cottage industry origins to a wide, prized backlist. With roots in rural writing, Little Toller has branched out to seek unusual voices, resurrecting the life of the wood engraver Clifford Webb, turning landfill into prose, uncovering Edward Thomas’s hidden photographs and finding a bestseller in the diary of a young naturalist along the way. We turn to the magazine’s archives for John Seymour’s advice on cheddaring, sparging and gaffing, and there’s the usual round-up of recommended reading from off the beaten track.
38 minutes
The Last Enemy | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

The Last Enemy | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

The Last Enemy by Richard Hillary is one of the great classic memoirs of the Second World War. Hillary was a charming, good-looking and rather arrogant young man, fresh from public school and Oxford, when, like many of his friends, he abandoned university to train as a pilot on the outbreak of war in 1939. At the flying training school, meeting men who hadn’t enjoyed the same gilded youth as he had, his view of the world, and of himself, began to change. Shot down in 1940 during the Battle of Britain, he suffered terrible burns and was treated by the pioneering plastic surgeon Archibald McIndoe. During those brief and gruelling wartime months this once privileged young man was forced to grow up as he struggled to come to terms with his defacing injuries and mourned the loss of his friends
24th July 2020

Slightly Foxed Editors’ Diary • 24 July 2020

On Sunday afternoon we set out for a walk in what is to me one of the strangest green spaces in this part of London, Abney Park Cemetery. Hidden behind the chic little boutiques and coffee shops of Stoke Newington Church Street, its 30-acre site originally formed part of the grounds of Fleetwood House and Abney House, both built in the 1600s and now demolished, one of which was lived in from 1734 until his death in 1748 by the preacher and hymn writer Isaac Watts.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors

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