Newsletters

The Sensation of Crossing the Street

The Sensation of Crossing the Street

Greetings from Hoxton Square, where the office is all a flurry with orders following the release of the summer issue of Slightly Foxed and our summer SF Edition, Toast. Beyond the controlled chaos of the first floor here at No. 53, the square and surrounding streets have come alive to the beat of summer at last. The trees have unfurled their leaves, people are walking their dogs or enjoying the sunshine (between showers) at street café tables and pub gardens have become host to a gaggle of watering-hole seekers. While many an author has made London the beating heart of their work, this year marks 100 years since the publication of Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf’s beloved novel set over the course of a single day in June.
The Very Bottom of Time | ‘Whatever power of thought or memory I held was bound up in the war . . .’

The Very Bottom of Time | ‘Whatever power of thought or memory I held was bound up in the war . . .’

It is three o’clock in the morning, ‘the very bottom of time’ as Pamela Bright describes it, and her ward is filled with wounded men. So overstretched is she that she barely knows where she is, but as her gut-wrenchingly vivid account progresses, we begin to understand that she is in a Casualty Clearing Station attached to the British Second Army in Normandy, which had landed a week after D-Day in June 1944. Pamela is one of the young nurses working heroically to tend to the wounded in impossible conditions a few miles from the front line.
A Second Home | ‘Seven years ago, is it really so long? They were years in which perhaps half a million words were drafted and redrafted . . .’

A Second Home | ‘Seven years ago, is it really so long? They were years in which perhaps half a million words were drafted and redrafted . . .’

When Dame Hilary Mantel died, many readers of her novels learned more about her life and her heroic struggle with the serious medical condition from which she suffered for many years without a diagnosis. Nowhere is this more vividly or more movingly described than in her own powerful and haunting memoir, Giving up the Ghost. It is a story of ‘wraiths and phantoms’, a story not easy to forget.
A Spy in a Courteous Enemy Camp | ‘You would find first, I think, if placed in the situation yourself, that it was extraordinarily interesting . . .’

A Spy in a Courteous Enemy Camp | ‘You would find first, I think, if placed in the situation yourself, that it was extraordinarily interesting . . .’

In 1972 James Morris booked a return ticket to Casablanca and underwent what would now be called gender reassignment surgery. Soon afterwards Jan Morris wrote a book about what it had felt like to live – or try to live – for forty odd years with the absolute conviction that she was a woman trapped in a man’s body, and how this agony had finally been resolved. That book was Conundrum and when it was published in 1974 it caused a sensation.
‘The exhausted Meaulnes has the impression of a house long since abandoned – broken windows, missing doors . . .’ | From the Slightly Foxed Archives

‘The exhausted Meaulnes has the impression of a house long since abandoned – broken windows, missing doors . . .’ | From the Slightly Foxed Archives

Greetings from Hoxton Square, where we’re checking proofs of the next issue of SF, carefully unpacking early copies of the next hand-numbered Slightly Foxed Edition (No. 71: Nigel Slater’s Toast, decked out in a delicious toast-brown cloth), preparing for the release of Episode 53 of the Slightly Foxed Podcast on 15 April, and plotting a June trip to an intriguing little bookshop in Cambridge to toast the forthcoming quarter.
The Start of Something Big | ‘We are on our way to Oxford, the dazzling publisher and I, to visit a woman as old as the century . . .’

The Start of Something Big | ‘We are on our way to Oxford, the dazzling publisher and I, to visit a woman as old as the century . . .’

It is a Saturday morning in 1981 and Jennie Erdal is embarking on a journey with the man she calls ‘Tiger’, the flamboyant figure at the centre of Ghosting, the strange and gripping story of the twenty years in which she became his ghost writer, pulling the wool over the eyes of reviewers and turning him into the literary lion he had always wanted to be.

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.

By signing up for our free email newsletter or our free printed catalogues, you will not automatically be subscribed to the quarterly magazine. To become a subscriber to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly Magazine, please visit our subscriptions page.

Slightly Foxed undertakes to keep your personal information confidential. You can read more about this in our Privacy Policy. You can unsubscribe from our list at any point by changing your preferences, or contacting us directly. Alternatively, if you have an account you can manage your preferences in your account settings.

Where to next?

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.