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

U and I and Me

U and I and Me

I hadn’t read much John Updike when I picked up Nicholson Baker’s book on him during lockdown; but then neither had Baker when he wrote the book. This is one of the novelties of U and I. Where most non-fiction strives for mastery of its subject, this little book pursues that ‘very spottiness of coverage [that] is, along with the wildly untenable generalizations that spring from it, one of the most important features of the thinking we do about living writers’. The result is a funny, profound meditation on what writers actually mean to readers as opposed to what academics tell us they should mean.
SF magazine subscribers only
1st September 2023

Slightly Foxed Issue 79: From the Editors

New contributors to Slightly Foxed sometimes ask us which issue their piece is going to appear in and the truth is, we’re usually hard put to tell them in advance. One pleasure of SF is that we’re not bound by publication dates for new books, so we rarely plan a piece for a particular issue but instead welcome good contributions and select from what we have. We’ve always worked on the bran-tub principle that we’d like readers to dip in and find something unexpected that they wouldn’t normally have been looking for. But despite this, each issue does seem to come together with a particular atmosphere and character of its own.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
Wolf Hall for kids | Why Ronald Welch’s novels will help your children fall in love with history

Wolf Hall for kids | Why Ronald Welch’s novels will help your children fall in love with history

‘Ronald Welch, a tank commander turned schoolmaster, is one of the 20th century’s most underrated children’s writers . . . Like Hilary Mantel, he understood that what makes a lost epoch stick in your mind is not the dates but the details.’ Telegraph Ronald Welch’s Carey novels follow the fortunes of the same family from their involvement in the Crusades to their service in the First World War and each of these books proves Welch to be a master of the precise detail that brings history alive for younger readers. ‘They are less subtle than the novels of his brilliant contemporary Rosemary Sutcliff, with her outcast, marginal character heroes,’ observes Iona McLaren in her review our Slightly Foxed Cubs editions for the Telegraph, ‘but Welch makes up for it in guilty pleasure. Through the twistiest of plots, Welch’s hero typically discovers himself to be the best fighter of his generation, who ends up brushing with the Big Names of the period, fixed in the reader’s mind for all time with memorable pen portraits’.

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.