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Sailing On

Sailing On

I chose a few sentences from the first chapter of Arthur Ransome’s Peter Duck (1932) for my mother’s funeral. I often read his books to her when she was old, demented and dying in a care home. When she couldn’t remember what had happened on the page or even the paragraph before, I whittled my reading down to selections from chapters I knew to be her favourites and which I loved myself. The opening of Peter Duck was one of them. Imagine an old seafarer, long retired, sitting on a bollard in Lowestoft’s inner harbour, watching the crew of a little green schooner preparing for a voyage.
SF magazine subscribers only
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
A Countryman’s Spring Notebook | Introduction

A Countryman’s Spring Notebook | Introduction

Spring, for many, is a hopeful time of year. As the days lengthen with a warming sun, the natural world stirs with an energy that enlivens us. The immediate pleasure that Wordsworth felt when seeing ‘a host, of golden daffodils’ has been shared by many. For Emily Dickinson, ‘A Light exists in Spring’ that ‘Almost speaks to you’. Shakespeare writes of the arrival of spring as ‘The sweet o’ the year’, while for William Howlitt the season has a ‘freshness that perhaps we have felt only in childhood’. Adrian Bell lived the life of a countryman for sixty years, and his ability to capture and articulate an essence of spring in his work bears comparison with any writer in this tradition.
A Countryman’s Summer Notebook | Introduction

A Countryman’s Summer Notebook | Introduction

‘I wonder what it would be like to live in a world where it was always June,’ exclaims Anne Shirley, L. M. Montgomery’s delightful character from the Anne of Green Gables novels. In these Summer Notebook essays, the third volume of the seasonal quartet published by Slightly Foxed, Adrian Bell gives us an idea of what it might be like. Writing across thirty of his own summers, together with his memories of earlier ones, Bell expresses the natural exuberance of the English landscape during the summer months; in particular, the ones he enjoyed in the eastern county of Suffolk, where he arrived as a young man to start a farming apprenticeship in 1920. His subsequent travels around the fields and villages of East Anglia – physically and in memory – result in a rich tapestry of past and present visions, creating indelible portraits of a countryside in summer.
A Countryman’s Autumn Notebook | Introduction

A Countryman’s Autumn Notebook | Introduction

‘There is a fortnight when England seems to have every- thing – the flowers of a northern June and the fruits of the warm south, and that fortnight is now. You can stand in the windless calm of an autumn evening and hear the heartbeat of the countryside.’ Bell’s autumn essays, from which this observation is drawn, evoke a season of colour and activity before the quiet and reflection of winter, and they complete our journey through the year with him in this, the final volume of the seasonal quartet of his Countryman’s Notebook.
Bookshop of the Quarter: Spring 2023

Bookshop of the Quarter: Spring 2023

Chris Saunders is the managing director of Henry Sotheran Ltd, the country’s oldest antiquarian bookseller. He is also a freelance writer who has written two small books on Edward Thomas, numerous articles and a couple of poems. He runs the literary blog Speaks Volumes. You can hear him discussing the world of antiquarian and second-hand bookselling in our podcast, Episode 12, ‘Slightly Foxed – But Still Desirable’.  Here he gives us a personal tour of Sotheran’s and shares his recommended reads, dream bookshop party guests and favourite Slightly Foxed publication.
Bookshop of the Quarter: Autumn 2022

Bookshop of the Quarter: Autumn 2022

We received a cheering email from Eduardo Ballester, a subscriber based on the south coast of Uruguay, back in 2019 which detailed plans to open a bookshop and a wish to stock Slightly Foxed. We jumped at the chance of our magazine and books finding readers in such a far-flung location, and eagerly anticipated the launch of Rizoma in La Juanita, José Ignacio a year later. It is always a thrill to see photos of our publications in such a beautiful setting. Please read on to hear more about Rizoma from Eduardo, pick up a book recommendation or two and cast your eyes over the striking photographs of the librería.

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