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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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Learn-As-You-Burn

Learn-As-You-Burn

When Slightly Foxed was young, only a few issues old in fact, the writer Christopher Hawtree came to us with the story of P. Y. Betts and her childhood memoir People Who Say Goodbye. We loved the book, and a piece about it by Christopher appeared in Issue 7. Now, several years later, we’re delighted to have the chance to issue People Who Say Goodbye as a Slightly Foxed Edition.

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The Heroism of Ordinary Life

The Heroism of Ordinary Life

Like many 15-year-olds I dreamt of understanding myself better. I knew my background was ‘bourgeois’ and thought I was probably gay. Did this mean that I ‘fitted in’? Or not? My English master lent me a story by Angus Wilson called ‘Fresh Air Fiend’, and this encouraged me to read Wilson’s landmark collections The Wrong Set (1949) and Such Darling Dodos (1950). I felt attracted by his mind: he seemed to have the social world thoroughly mapped and to be writing simultaneously with an insider’s confidence and an outsider’s sharp insights. There was a certain bitterness in these stories that both attracted and disturbed me.

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An Editorial Peacock

An Editorial Peacock

When she is not sugar-soaping her skirting boards or throwing scrunched paper snowballs of unsatisfactory prose, Kate Berridge is writing a biographical novel based on the life of John Ruskin.

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Winter Reading | Slightly Foxed Readers’ Catalogue

Winter Reading | Slightly Foxed Readers’ Catalogue

Greetings from Hoxton Square where we’re happily penning gift messages, winding ribbons, wrestling with tape guns and hauling post bags up and down the stairs to get all of your delicious (and most welcome) gift orders out over the next few weeks. ⁠There’s still plenty of time to order subscriptions, books and goods in time for Christmas. We ship our wares all around the world. Go forth, dear booklovers, and browse our online Readers’ Catalogue, where you’ll find our cloth-bound limited-edition hardbacks, our popular paperbacks and Plain Editions, a small collection of literary goods and our pick of titles from other publishers’ bookshelves. We do hope that it provides some interesting and unusual present solutions. Or perhaps you may be tempted to stock up on some reading for yourself.

Love, War and the Countess

I think it was my old friend the Evening Standard columnist Angus McGill who recommended Hermione, Countess of Ranfurly’s war diaries: Angus would have loved her unpretentious skill at conjuring up another place, another time. Published in 1994, they have the enthralling quality that Dostoevsky called ‘living life’, oﬀering you a front-row seat at the great unfolding historical drama of the Second World War. They were written on the hoof, in moments snatched at the end of long, exhausting working days when letter- writing had also to be ﬁtted in. Fifty years later she prepared them for publication and was astonished by their success.

Delectable Collectable Children’s Books | Slightly Foxed Cubs

Delectable Collectable Children’s Books | Slightly Foxed Cubs

Bound in coloured cloth, with printed endpapers and original illustrations, the Foxed Cubs make ideal presents, as stand-alone titles, or in sets. Whether you wish to venture back to Roman Britain with Rosemary Sutcliff, escape to the wild with ‘BB’, join up the dots of history with Ronald Welch, or begin to build a library for a young booklover by picking a few titles by each author (or collecting the full set at once) we have books, bundles and offers to satisfy all readers and occasions.

The Last Bookshop in Europe

The Last Bookshop in Europe

The white van was seen one morning to draw up in the little car park overlooking Clogher beach, a stormy inlet of the Dingle peninsula in south-west Ireland. Four men in black suits climbed out, edged down the slippery concrete steps and lined up on the beach. Then, as if responding to an invisible signal, they raised their arms in salute over the ocean, and shouted into the wind in a strange tongue.

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Bookshop of the Quarter: Winter 2019

Bookshop of the Quarter: Winter 2019

Bleak House Books in San Po Kong, Kowloon, is one of the furthermost bookshops from our corner of Hoxton Square and we were thrilled when co-founder Albert Wan and his team of booksellers decided to give Slightly Foxed a try shortly after they opened in 2017. We’ve been shipping our wares across the seas ever since, and still delight in the fact that booklovers of Hong Kong can browse our magazine and books in person. We chatted to Albert about life in the bookshop, his favourite authors and the positive effects of providing good reading. And, to finish, there’s a round-up of recommendations from his fellow booksellers.

Under the Desert Sun

Under the Desert Sun

Abbey was born in 1927 on a family farm in the mountains of Appalachia, in western Pennsylvania, but before he was 20 he had travelled to the American south-west and fallen in love with the ‘implacable indifference’ of the red rock desert and labyrinthine canyons of ‘the four corners’, the point at which Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado converge. It would forever speak to his heart. By the 1950s he was working as a park ranger, and in 1956 he began two seasons at the Arches National Monument in south-east Utah, now a national park. He was home. It was a time of ‘pure, smug, animal satisfaction’. He began to keep a journal that would later blossom into an elegiac memoir: Desert Solitaire (1968).

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Inhabiting a Character

Years ago, travelling in Sri Lanka, I gave my copy of Mary Lavin’s Tales from Bective Bridge (1942), long out of print, to someone who had helped me, and immediately regretted it – where would I find another? Mary Lavin, once hugely admired and honoured, had been forgotten, as had almost all her work.

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A Fur Coat and a Typewriter

As yet another fearless female reporter in a flak jacket flashes on to our television screens to tell us in rapid bursts how British troops came under fire that day, I often think of the handful of women eighty or so years earlier who fought for the privilege of being in a war zone and communicating that horror to those at home.

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Ghosts in the Dust

Ghosts in the Dust

John Reed is best known for Ten Days that Shook the World (1917), his classic account of the Bolshevik revolution. But where Ten Days rata-tat-tats like a telegram tapped out under gunfire, Insurgent Mexico slaps across a literary canvas lavish swathes of colour and furious heat and open-hearted characters and swirls them around till you can taste the dust, feel the sweat dribbling down your back and find yourself casting round for your horse, your woman and your gun.

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A Rare Veld-flower

A Rare Veld-flower

If a case could be made that writers look like their work, then Pauline Smith would be a good example. In her girlhood and youth there was about her a refinement of feature that recalls, at a stretch, the young Audrey Hepburn. And as anyone familiar with her writing will attest, there is about Smith’s subject-matter and her use of language the hallmark of a particularly refined sensibility.

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How Homer Taught Me to Read

How Homer Taught Me to Read

She was reading and I asked her what she was doing. After a moment’s hesitation she asked if I would like to hear the story. Of course I said yes, so she turned back to the first page and began. I have seen the book so often since that I must be careful not to invent a memory of how it looked on that first occasion. But it was Professor E. V. Rieu’s translation of the Odyssey, the first volume of the Penguin Classics of which he was General Editor, bound in the all-over brown which was the initial livery of the series.

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Strolling about on an Elephant

Strolling about on an Elephant

Up the stairs past the coloured 1850s lithographs of British sportsmen pig-sticking in India; into the room with the campaign chest and Grandfather’s medals on top, their clasps with names like Waziristan and Chitral, and the picture of the General, his half-brother, a Mutiny hero who eventually expired of apoplexy on the parade ground at Poona. There was no escaping the Raj – witness the fact that my first job when I joined John Murray in 1972 was to superintend an update of their Handbook to India.

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On the Randy Again

On the Randy Again

My father looked up from his Daily Express and said to my mother, ‘Dylan Thomas is dead.’ Why he announced this and why I took any notice and remember it now, I don’t know. I was only 8 and the name meant nothing to me. I don’t believe my father read any poetry, but back in 1953 Dylan Thomas was about as famous as a contemporary poet could be in the twentieth century.

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