Articles & Extracts

1st March 2014

Slightly Foxed Issue 41: From the Editors

As we mentioned in the last issue, we’re marking our tenth anniversary this year in various ways, but perhaps most importantly with the publication of a very unusual little book. It’s called Slightly Famous People’s Foxes and proceeds from the sale will go to buy books for the Hospital School at Great Ormond Street, which enables children to continue their education while they are there. These won’t be textbooks but books to read for pleasure – most of us probably know how just the right book can ease a stay in hospital, especially for children who may be in isolation or having long and painful treatments. It’s a cause close to our hearts, and we’d be delighted if you felt able to give it your support. The book costs a very affordable £5, and you’ll find a leaflet and an order form enclosed with this issue.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
1st September 2013

Slightly Foxed Issue 39: From the Editors

The summer has sped by and we’ve been travelling, giving talks about Slightly Foxed (with the essential tea and cakes) at the kind of small local festivals that often seem to have more meaning than the bigger events. They’re a great opportunity for us to meet local subscribers and see some very beautiful parts of the country. On 20 September we’ll be in another lovely place, Much Wenlock in Shropshire, where we’ll be talking at Wenlock Books.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
1st June 2012

Slightly Foxed Issue 34: From the Editors

Summer: the season of literary festivals, and Slightly Foxed is on the road. Our travels began early with an appearance, with author and contributor Penelope Lively, at the Words by the Water Festival in Cumbria in early March. Later that month we were at Christ Church, Oxford, for the first in what we hope will be a regular series of Slightly Foxed talks on forgotten authors at the Oxford Literary Festival. This year the philosopher and critic John Gray delivered a brilliant and entertaining talk on the work of John Cowper Powys, arising from the piece he wrote in our spring issue, neatly placing Powys as ‘an outdoor Proust’. On 14 June we’ll be launching the summer issue at Mr B’s cosy and very individual bookshop in Bath. And on Sunday 8 July we’ll be appearing at the West Meon Literary Festival in Hampshire with our contributor and prize-winning biographer Maggie Fergusson.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
1st September 2011

Slightly Foxed Issue 31: From the Editors

There’s an invigorating sharpness in the air now, that frosty tang that brings with it thoughts of country walks, winter fires, evenings with a good book, the possibilities of a new term. And with that, we can’t resist straightaway mentioning Mr Tibbits’s Catholic School by Ysenda Maxtone Graham, the latest of our Slightly Foxed Editions (see p. 12), and possibly the funniest we’ve published so far.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
A Delight in Digression

A Delight in Digression

In the north London suburb of Edmonton where I grew up, virtually the only feature of note is Charles Lamb’s cottage in Church Street, which is marked with a blue plaque. The essayist lived there in the first half of the nineteenth century. Lamb was born in 1775 and in 1792 began thirty-three years of tedious work as a clerk at the East India Company counting-house. Over the length of his adult life he lived – on and off – with his sister Mary. Their story is told in Sarah Burton’s highly readable A Double Life: A Biography of Charles and Mary Lamb (2003).
SF magazine subscribers only
The Fanny Factor

The Fanny Factor

It was some time in the mid-Sixties when things began to change in my mother’s kitchen. First we got a fridge. Farewell mesh-doored meat safe, farewell flecks of curdled milk floating in your tea. The second thing that happened was Fanny Cradock. This was a brief love affair – my mum later transferred her culinary trust and affection to Delia Smith – but while it lasted its impact was astonishing. Expenditure on piping bags, time spent tracking down a butter curler and a grapefruit knife, foods coloured contrary to the laws of Nature: the responsibility for this and much more could be laid at Fanny’s door.
SF magazine subscribers only
1st June 2010

Slightly Foxed Issue 26: From the Editors

Our bookshop is truly up and running now under its new banner ‘Slightly Foxed on Gloucester Road’. Renovations have been modest – fresh paint, new carpet, some moveable shelving to allow us to create space for launch parties and events and, as a finishing touch, a traditional pub-style hanging sign featuring the fox. Frankly, we’re so thrilled with it it’s hard for us to keep away, and we do hope that any of you visiting London will drop in there too, to have a browse and meet Tony and the rest of the staff. You’ll find a bookshop leaflet with more details in this issue.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
Outrunning Darkness

Outrunning Darkness

Scanning the contents page, I could see that these were tiny stories about everyday subjects, most no more than a couple of pages long – prose sketches rather than conventional narratives – with titles like ‘Trousers’, ‘The Job Application’ or ‘The Boat’. But in the middle there was one covering more than sixty pages called ‘The Walk’. It was the first story I read by Walser, and it introduced me to a writer of both tragic and exultant modesty.
SF magazine subscribers only
1st September 2008

Slightly Foxed Issue 19: From the Editors

For some months now, at our regular get-togethers, the five of us have been sitting round the table, chewing our pens and agonizing over the question: Is it time to put the price of Slightly Foxed up? We’ve held it for nearly five years – since we started in fact – and during that time the cost of postage has risen four times and the price of paper has risen twice, not to mention all the usual running costs of the office. (Even Pugwash’s running costs have risen steeply as he’s a very wobbly old dog now, rather like Thurber’s dog Muggs, who would wander unnervingly about ‘like Hamlet following his father’s ghost’.) Needless to say, we’ve done everything we can to keep costs down – including no staff pay-rises – but those who advise us on our finances have been murmuring with ever-growing insistence about the need to increase our price and urging us to do so.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors

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