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Travel the world with Slightly Foxed

Travel the world with Slightly Foxed

‘The two weeks in Washington seemed to last an age, for travel makes time stand still, like a dream which takes one through a long series of adventures while actually lasting only a few moments.’ Jessica Mitford, SF Edition No. 52: Hons and Rebels Greetings from Hoxton Square, where we offer a series of adventures across the globe through our Slightly Foxed Editions. Guided by intrepid and entertaining travel companions, we traverse the United States with Jessica Mitford, Italian mountain ranges with Eric Newby, East Africa with Roald Dahl and blistering Spain with Laurie Lee. These are just a few of the far-flung destinations we visit in our series of classic memoirs – each edition brings alive a particular place and invites you into someone else’s world.
‘Ring of Bright Water caught me off guard’ | Jim Crumley on Gavin Maxwell

‘Ring of Bright Water caught me off guard’ | Jim Crumley on Gavin Maxwell

Greetings from Hoxton Square where, this summer, we’re travelling to far-flung destinations through the pages of Slightly Foxed. The latest issue of the magazine takes us far and wide, from language-hunting in the Karakorum and climbing Mount Kenya to Anthony Burgess’s Malaya and Robert Graves’s Ancient Rome . . . However, today we’re heading to the West Highlands of Scotland with Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water, with the Scottish nature writer Jim Crumley as our guide.
S is for Sagan, Françoise | From the Slightly Foxed archives

S is for Sagan, Françoise | From the Slightly Foxed archives

‘My love of pleasure seems to be the only consistent side of my character. Is it because I have not read enough?’ Françoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse Greetings from Hoxton Square, where we’re once again travelling through the magazine’s archives to provide some welcome weekend reading. Charlie Lee-Potter’s piece on Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse appeared in Slightly Foxed Issue 14 and transports us to a summer spent on the French Riviera.
Escape from France | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

Escape from France | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

‘Revisiting the Carey novels today, I am struck by how fresh and magnetizing they have remained, and by how much there is in these books – as there is in all good children’s literature – that can be enjoyed by adults. It is common for readers of Welch to credit him with sparking a love of history . . .’ We thought it timely to travel back to June 1791 through the pages of Escape from France, a Carey adventure set in the midst of the French Revolution.
Look Back With Love | From The Slightly Foxed bookshelves

Look Back With Love | From The Slightly Foxed bookshelves

‘I think I’m an oddity really, but I do my very, very best to write well’ We’re very pleased to announce that Look Back with Love by Dodie Smith is now available in a cloth-bound hardback Plain Foxed Edition. These sturdy little books, bound in duck-egg blue cloth, come in the same neat pocket format as the original SF Editions. In her preface to this edition, Dodie Smith’s biographer Valerie Grove describes Look Back with Love as ‘one of the happiest and funniest accounts of an Edwardian upbringing’. And indeed it is.
Slightly Foxed for Father’s Day

Slightly Foxed for Father’s Day

‘Variety, the unexpected, a bit of vulgarity and the ridiculous mixed in with the elevated . . .’ This has been Roger Hudson’s recipe in compiling a commonplace book from material he’s gathered over the past 40 years. Surprise, recognition, amusement, An Englishman’s Commonplace Book calls forth a variety of reactions. Ranging over the centuries, it contains a rich mix of often arresting facts, vivid descriptions, absurd observations and wise words, all organized under subject headings to help find that appropriate quote. Altogether a book for the times and a perfect present. With Father’s Day approaching we thought some of you may appreciate a few gift ideas for the father figures in your lives. All items can be wrapped in handsome brown paper, tied up with our smart and understated cream ribbon and sent off to the recipient, or to you to hand over in person, in good time for Sunday 20 June.
‘The thrill of a new issue has not dimmed’ | New this Summer from Slightly Foxed

‘The thrill of a new issue has not dimmed’ | New this Summer from Slightly Foxed

We’re delighted to report that the new Summer issue of Slightly Foxed (No. 70) has now left the printing press at Smith Settle and will start to arrive with readers in the UK very soon and elsewhere over the next few weeks. With it, as usual, you’ll find a copy of our latest Readers’ Catalogue, detailing new books, our backlist, selected seasonal reading and other offers and bundles. We hope it will provide plenty of recommendations for reading off the beaten track this summer. As ever, we look forward to the flurry of emails, letters, postcards and telephone calls that the turn of the new quarter brings – it’s a joy to correspond with our readers. We do hope you’ll enjoy the new issue of the magazine, wherever in the world you are.
Still Life | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

Still Life | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

Introducing the latest addition to the Slightly Foxed Editions list, No. 55: Still Life. The historian Richard Cobb, famous for his brilliant books on France and the French Revolution, his inspirational teaching and his unconventional behaviour, grew up in the 1920s and ’30s in the quiet and deeply conventional town of Tunbridge Wells. In this unusual memoir he recreates his childhood in entrancing detail. The book is indeed a ‘still life’, a snapshot of a miniature world caught at a particular moment in time. Yet every page contains some wonderfully recaptured human or geographical detail which stays in the mind and brings the town and its people colourfully alive again. ‘Strange and wonderful,’ wrote Hilary Spurling in the Observer when the book was first published. And indeed it is.
R is for Robinson, Marilynne | From the Slightly Foxed archives

R is for Robinson, Marilynne | From the Slightly Foxed archives

‘Once in a blue moon an encounter with a new book can be like falling in love’ Ariane Bankes, Slightly Foxed Issue 20 Greetings from SF, where we hope our contributors’ articles introduce you to a whole host of books to fall in love with. Or perhaps, at times, the magazine’s reading recommendations reacquaint you with beloved books you might like to revisit. Whether or not you’re new to the novels of Marilynne Robinson, Ariane Bankes states her case for picking up a copy of Housekeeping (and following this with Robinson’s equally acclaimed Gilead series) in her article from SF Issue 20. Please find a link to read the full article below, and we do hope you’ll enjoy it.
Beautiful books bound in duck-egg blue | Plain Foxed Editions

Beautiful books bound in duck-egg blue | Plain Foxed Editions

‘Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves.’ Greetings from SF HQ, where this line from Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris is ringing in our ears as we survey our book-filled scene, roll up our sleeves and spring clean the office in preparation for deliveries of yet more delicious books next month.  If you’d like to help us clear a few shelves and take the opportunity to stock up on any Plain Foxed Editions you might have had your eye on, now is the time. By way of thanks for your support over the last year, we’re providing a special offer when you buy pairs or sets of books from this perfectly pocketable series until Friday 7 May. We do hope you enjoy browsing our bookshelves.
Going Solo | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

Going Solo | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

Greetings from Hoxton Square where we’re hurtling through the spring quarter at pace. When looking at our diaries to plan the week ahead, we were surprised to find that we’ve already landed on 20 April, which, this year, marks the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Athens. The Battle of Athens (also known as the Battle of Piraeus Harbour) is the name given by Roald Dahl to a dog-fighting air battle, fought between the Royal Air Force and the Luftwaffe towards the end of the Battle of Greece. Dahl describes this airborne adventure in his second memoir, Going Solo, which is available in a handsome Slightly Foxed Edition. He was clearly a brilliant pilot, and his account of what it was like to confront the enemy from the cramped cockpit of a Hurricane, with minimal training in how to fly it, is stomach-churning.
Q is for Quiller-Couch, Arthur | From the Slightly Foxed archives

Q is for Quiller-Couch, Arthur | From the Slightly Foxed archives

Our series of recommendations for good reading via the magazine’s archives has brought us to a letter of the alphabet we thought could prove troublesome. However, all fears have been eased as it offers up a writer Daphne du Maurier ‘admired among all others’, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, whose works were published under the pseudonym ‘Q’. Du Maurier was far from Q’s only admirer. Helene Hanff enjoyed a volume of lectures by Quiller-Couch, and was inspired to seek out all the titles he recommended. This led to a correspondence with an antiquarian bookshop in London that lasted many years, and these letters became the beloved 84, Charing Cross Road. Helene pays her debt to her reading mentor in a subsequent memoir, Q’s Legacy. Derek Parker states his own case for Q’s legacy in this piece from Slightly Foxed Issue 21. Please find a link to read the full article below. We do hope you’ll enjoy it. 
The Cherry Tree | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

The Cherry Tree | From the Slightly Foxed bookshelves

Greetings from Slightly Foxed where the team in the office are looking forward to an extended Easter weekend and the prospect of a healthy dose of fresh air, feasting and, most importantly, much good reading. Meantime, we’ll leave you with a suitably seasonal extract from the final volume of Adrian Bell’s trilogy of lightly fictionalized memoirs, The Cherry Tree. As SF Editor Hazel Wood writes in her preface to our edition, ‘in these books [Bell’s] keen and sympathetic eye combined with the practicality of the farmer to create some of the most poetic yet down-to-earth accounts ever written of life in the English countryside’. We’ll be in touch again next week. Until then, we do hope you’ll enjoy reading this extract and browsing our bookshelves.

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