From the Editors

1st September 2026

Slightly Foxed Issue 91: From the Editors

With autumn here and Christmas inexorably approaching, we’re reaching the end of the 2026 National Year of Reading, a campaign to get children – and others – reading for pleasure. This is a very different thing from learning to decode words to improve the national literacy statistics, the first being something that lasts a lifetime and the second something that learning to read can easily turn into. It is of course a cause close to our hearts, since reading for pleasure is what Slightly Foxed is about.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
1st June 2026

Slightly Foxed Issue 90: From the Editors

Henry James famously said that for him ‘summer afternoon’ were the two most beautiful words in the English language and for many of us no doubt, however unpredictable the weather, the idea of summer still conjures up hopeful and romantic pictures of warm afternoons and scented evenings, cricket games, al fresco meals and beach picnics. Wherever you’ll be this summer the right book for the right place is of course essential, and we hope you’ll enjoy the suggestions in this issue, from sailing with Arthur Ransome to wandering the unspoiled English countryside with the Victorian nature-writer Richard Jefferies or following Julius Caesar during the last year of his life with Thornton Wilder’s The Ides of March – a scuffed grey copy of which was serendipitously spotted in a card board box of discarded holiday thrillers in a Greek seaside café and greatly enjoyed by Noonie Minogue (see p. 76).
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
2nd March 2026

Slightly Foxed Issue 89: From the Editors

As we were sitting round the kitchen table recently, chewing over general thoughts about SF and plans for the year ahead, it struck us that some of our most interesting and original pieces have come to us via our Writers’ Competitions. One of our aims, when we started Slightly Foxed, was to find contributors from as wide a range of back grounds as possible rather than depending on professional journalists and published writers to fill the magazine. This policy has led us in so many interesting directions and proved that you don’t have to be a ‘writer’ to write well. It’s also become obvious from the many letters and emails we receive from all over the world that our subscribers are a fascinating bunch, well able to hold their own when it comes to putting words together.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
1st December 2025

Slightly Foxed Issue 88: From the Editors

Here in the Slightly Foxed office the passage of the seasons is marked not so much by changes in the weather as changes in the number of books and issues piled up in what seems like an ever-diminishing space. At the beginning of each quarter it’s often quite tricky to negotiate a way round piles of the latest issue and the accompanying Slightly Foxed Edition, newly delivered by Smith Settle, our printers in Yorkshire. Our lovely office staff, Rebecca, Isabel, Edie and Ruth, run a very tight ship, but it’s a relief when the piles begin to shrink as new orders arrive and books and issues are sent out.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
1st September 2025

Slightly Foxed Issue 87: From the Editors

The Slightly Foxed office is always busy but there’s something about the arrival of autumn – brisker air, shorter days, everyone back together again after the summer holidays – that brings a burst of extra energy with it. As always at this time of year, we’re finalizing arrangements for Readers’ Day, which is on 8 November at our usual Bloomsbury meeting place, the Art Workers’ Guild in Queen Square. For those who haven’t yet experienced it, it’s always a jolly occasion, winding up with cake and a convivial glass of Madeira. This year we have a great line-up, including Tim Kendall on his edition of the letters between William Golding and his editor at Faber, Charles Monteith; Sarah Anderson and Martin Latham on the art of book selling; Maggie Fergusson on the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins; and Catherine Coldstream on her much praised memoir Cloistered, an account of the years she spent as a nun in an enclosed Carmelite order. We still have a few tickets left, so if you’re interested, do get in touch as soon as possible.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
1st June 2025

Slightly Foxed Issue 86: From the Editors

June, the month when London begins to empty out and then fill up again with summer visitors, on the buses, on the underground, and in the restaurants and coffee shops around Hoxton Square. It’s the time of year when, at Slightly Foxed too, we begin to think of getting out of the office to visit bookshops in other parts of the country, or to take part in the kind of small literary festivals and book club get-togethers that are a million miles away from the high-profile sales events that the bigger literary festivals have become. We’ve had some of our most heartwarming, entertaining and sometimes eccentric experiences in village halls, country churches and occasionally private houses, where we meet up with readers and get a real sense of what’s going on in the places where they live. In fact on 20 June we two will be appearing at an afternoon event for the Two Moors Festival, at St Winifred’s Church, Manaton, on the edge of Dartmoor. So if you live in, or happen to be visiting, this lovely part of the south-west, please do come along (for details visit www.twomoorsfestival.com).
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
1st March 2024

Slightly Foxed Issue 81: From the Editors

In the spring of our twentieth anniversary year we’ve been feeling a little ruminative – looking back on the good times and all the fun we’ve had, but also remembering crises like the Covid lockdowns, when the whole world seemed out of joint, as it surely does at present. At difficult times like these it’s very clear from your messages how much the regular arrival of Slightly Foxed means to you and what a comfort reading and the sharing of reading can be. There’s nothing quite like a friendship formed over books – something Vesna Goldsworthy recalls in her piece on p.19 describing her meetings over many years with the novelist Graham Swift. There was, she says, always a certain reserve between them, but ‘it evaporated when we spoke about books, and those were always the best exchanges’.
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
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

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