‘Any bookshop-boosting push needs good examples beyond the obvious chains. Slightly Foxed – first a bibliophilic quarterly and small boutique publisher, and since 2009 also the genial entity behind the eponymous independent store in South Kensington – is one such.
Like any clever hand-selling bookseller, the Foxed publishing arm has the knack of re-introducing – in quietly handsome editions – the sort of titles that readers, once they know them, not only enjoy but come to love. True to form, their latest duo consists of two incomparable memoirs: in hardback, Christabel Bielenberg’s account of her life as a dissident German lawyer’s wife under the Third Reich, The Past is Myself; and in paperback, VS Pritchett’s matchless record of his poor, peripatetic but somehow magical London childhood before and during the First World War, A Cab at the Door.’