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Slightly Foxed Issue 51
Slightly Foxed Issue 51 Sample Spreads
Slightly Foxed Issue 51 Sample Spreads
Slightly Foxed Issue 51 Sample Spreads
Slightly Foxed Issue 51 Sample Spreads
Slightly Foxed Issue 51 Back Cover
  • ISBN: 9781906562892
  • Pages: 96
  • Dimensions: 210 x 148mm
  • Illustrations: B/W
  • Publication date: 1 September 2016
  • Producer: Smith Settle
  • Cover artist: Olivia Lomenech Gill, ‘Vasalisa’s Garden’
  • ISSN: 1742-5794

Slightly Foxed Issue 51

‘A Cheerful Revolutionary’

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The independent-minded quarterly that combines good looks, good writing and a personal approach. Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal. Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it’s more like a well-read friend than a literary magazine.

In this issue

Michael Barber hangs out on the Maginot Line • Ursula Buchan follows Montrose to the Borders • Patrick Welland explains the Singapore Grip • Amanda Theunissen meets a revolutionary with a sense of fun • Henry Jeffreys relives his university days with David Lodge • Daisy Hay finds Mary Wollstonecraft very contemporary • Derek Collett sits in on some psychiatric sessions • Victoria Neumark asks ‘Goodbye to all what?’ • Derek Parker goes backstage with some extremely old actors and much more besides . . .


A Cheerful Revolutionary • AMANDA THEUNISSEN

On the memoirs of Alexander Herzen

Hanging Out on the Maginot Line • MICHAEL BARBER

Anthony Rhodes, Sword of Bone

Strindberg’s Island • KARIN ALTENBERG

August Strindberg, The People of Hemsö

The Rummidge Chronicles • HENRY JEFFREYS

On David Lodge’s university novels

A Battersea Childhood • JEREMY LEWIS

Richard Church, Over the Bridge

Collapse in the Colony • PATRICK WELLAND

J. G. Farrell, The Singapore Grip

Love and Miss Lotti • SUE GEE

Penelope Fitzgerald, Charlotte Mew and Her Friends

Hero Ahead of His Time • URSULA BUCHAN

John Buchan, Montrose and Witch Wood

Goodbye to All What? • VICTORIA NEUMARK

Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That

Mostly in the Mind • DEREK COLLETT

Nigel Balchin, Mine Own Executioner

Letters from the Heart • DAISY HAY

Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written in Sweden . . .

Raising the Dead • REBECCA WILLIS

Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

A Purple Gentian • TANIA HERSHMAN

Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams

Land of Lost Content • MARTIN SORRELL

Ted Walker, The Last of England

Not-so-gay Paree • ROWENA MACDONALD

Jean Rhys, Quartet and Voyage in the Dark

Caught in the Act • DEREK PARKER

On obscure books


About Slightly Foxed

The independent-minded quarterly that combines good looks, good writing and a personal approach. Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal. Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it’s more like a well-read friend than a literary magazine. Read more about Slightly Foxed.

‘Sparky and independent’ The Times

‘Opening Slightly Foxed triggered one of those moments when you have to ask yourself, “How it is possible that I did not know this existed until now?” Slightly Foxed features short pieces by authors and contributors who each write about a book or author they enjoy. It’s kind of like Nick Hornby’s column in the 'Believer' – it will likely give you a lot of ideas of things you’d like to read someday, but it’s also enjoyable to just read someone’s description and stories about a book they love.’ Books, The Universe & Everything



Slightly Foxed Issue 51: From the Editors

After the events of the past few months, we must admit that, though extremely cheerful and optimistic, we’re also feeling a bit ruminative here in the office. Somehow the timeless and civilizing...

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‘A tonic of inspiration and pleasure . . .’

‘Autumn Slightly Foxed received as ever a tonic of inspiration and pleasure. Thank you!’

Read more

Hanging Out on the Maginot Line

In 1989 I was commissioned to write and present a programme about the Phoney War for BBC Radio 4. My research took me to the Imperial War Museum’s sound archives and the testimony of a Dunkirk...

Read more

Slightly Foxed Issue 51: From the Editors

After the events of the past few months, we must admit that, though extremely cheerful and optimistic, we’re also feeling a bit ruminative here in the office. Somehow the timeless and civilizing...

Read more

A Cheerful Revolutionary

Alexander Herzen was a nineteenth-century Russian political reformer and philosopher who wrote five volumes of what he described as ‘memoirs in progress’. Alexander Herzen was a...

Read more

Strindberg’s Island

One early autumn, when life wasn’t going exactly to plan, I joined two friends sailing around the Stockholm archipelago, the 20,000 islands and skerries that protect the approach to the Swedish...

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The Rummidge Chronicles

Some fellow English literature students took refuge in drink, drugs or promiscuity. My escape was the novels of David Lodge. Between 1975 and 1988 he wrote Changing Places, Small World and Nice Work,...

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A Battersea Childhood

Richard Church is remembered, if at all, as a late-flowering Georgian poet and a busy man of letters who contributed reviews to such long-forgotten periodicals as John O’London’s Weekly, and who...

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Collapse in the Colony

With two prize-winning novels – Troubles and The Siege of Krishnapur (see SF nos. 49 and 50) – behind him, J. G. Farrell felt sufficiently confident to paint his next exploration of the decline...

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Love and Miss Lotti

Was anyone ever as singular as Charlotte Mew? Mannish, gruffish, diminutive, she ranged about London in her tailor-mades and cropped hair and rolled her own cigarettes, possibly with the discarded...

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Hero Ahead of His Time

One day I found a copy of Montrose, written by my grandfather, John Buchan, and published in 1928. Despite having been taught at university to be pretty sniffy about any history that made...

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Goodbye to All What?

Now I found myself asking: what was Robert Graves saying ‘goodbye’ to? When he published Goodbye to All That (1929), his startling memoir of his youth and his experiences on the Western Front in...

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Mostly in the Mind

I watched a lot of television in my twenties and I doubt whether it did me much good. But it did lead, indirectly, to my discovering the fascinating novels of Nigel Balchin. In 1990 I saw a TV drama...

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Letters from the Heart

Over the past few months I’ve been immersed in a feast of late-eighteenth-century reading as I’ve meandered through the foothills of a new book project. I’ve had the delight of reacquainting...

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Raising the Dead

Someone must have recommended it. Otherwise there’s no way, twenty years ago, I’d have picked up an 880-page book about the French Revolution. Even a novel. But I did pick up Hilary Mantel’s A...

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A Purple Gentian

I read Einstein’s Dreams (1992), by Alan Lightman, not long after it was published. I was in my mid-20s, freshly released from a degree in maths and physics I had understood very little of, and...

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Land of Lost Content

One afternoon sometime in the early 1950s, the lad who by a country mile was my father’s ablest pupil in his sixth-form French and Spanish class rang our doorbell, and announced that the schoolgirl...

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Not-so-gay Paree

I first read Jean Rhys in my mid-teens; a copy of Quartet from my parents’ bookshelf, which drew me with its undemanding slimness and its cover featuring the beautiful face of Isabelle Adjani in...

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Caught in the Act

I waited until my wife was looking the other way, nipped quickly in and bought it. Admittedly, it weighed six pounds, its heavy leather binding was rather battered and, as the label said, it ‘lacks...

Read more

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