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Slightly Foxed Issue 69
  • ISBN: 9781910898543
  • Pages: 96
  • Dimensions: 210 x 148mm
  • Illustrations: B/W
  • Publication date: 1 March 2021
  • Producer: Smith Settle
  • Cover Artist: Niki Bowers, ‘“Spring Green” Tulips’
  • ISSN: 1742-5794
Made in Britain

Slightly Foxed Issue 69

‘The Pram in the Hall’

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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

Anthony Wells marvels at Montaigne • Ursula Buchan shelves her literary assumptions • Andy Merrills gets the lowdown on Lyndon B. Johnson • Alice Jolly stays up late with Dr Spock • C. J. Driver spends a month in the country • Sue Gaisford feels the dawn wind • Christopher Rush hears the clock strike thirteen • Ysenda Maxtone Graham gets stuck on the mezzanine • Selina Hastings pays a visit to Don Otavio • Chris Saunders goes tramping, and much more besides . . .


The Pram in the Hall • LAURA FREEMAN

Barbara Hepworth, A Pictorial Autobiography

Before the Slaughter • JUSTIN MAROZZI

Laurie Lee, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

Growing Pains • MARTIN SORRELL

Fred Uhlman, Reunion

Lyndon B. Johnson, Dad and Me • ANDY MERRILS

Robert Caro, The Path to Power; Means of Ascent; Master of the Senate; The Passage of Power

The Nightmare of Room 101 • CHRISTOPHER RUSH

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

Murder and Walnut Cake • JULIE WELCH

Hazel Holt’s Mrs Malory crime novels

Torrington’s Tours • ROGER HUDSON

The diaries of John Byng, Lord Torrington

Love at First Sight • CHARLES HEBBERT

The novels of Antal Szerb

Thank You, Dr Spock • ALICE JOLLY

Benjamin Spock, Dr Spock’s Baby and Child Care

Judgement Day • C. J. DRIVER

J. L. Carr, A Month in the Country

Light in the Dark Ages • SUE GAISFORD

Rosemary Sutcliff, Dawn Wind

A Kind of Cosmic Refugee • NIGEL ANDREW

The novels of Julia Strachey

Walking for the Sun and the Wind • CHRIS SAUNDERS

Stephen Graham, The Gentle Art of Tramping

Bruised, Shocked, but Elated • SELINA HASTINGS

Sybille Bedford, A Visit to Don Otavio

The Great Self-Examiner • ANTHONY WELLS

The essays of Michel de Montaigne

Making a Meal of It • YSENDA MAXTONE GRAHAM

Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine

Shelving My Assumptions • URSULA BUCHAN

Volunteering in a local public library


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.



Slightly Foxed Issue 69: From the Editors

How cheering it is to see that there are signs of spring now both in the air and in the step of the people walking along Old Street and in the little streets around Hoxton Square. It feels as if...

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The Pram in the Hall

I lent my copy of Barbara Hepworth’s A Pictorial Autobiography to an illustrator friend who, for reasons of distance and diaries, I rarely see. We had been talking about children and creativity and...

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Before the Slaughter

How much we miss movement in our suddenly still, stay-at-home pandemic era. Gone the footloose and fancy-free travel of our rose tinted imaginations, replaced by domestic gloom, pessimistic prospects...

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Growing Pains

An annual pre-Christmas treat for me is discovering which books have impressed the great and the good of the literary world over the previous twelve months. The lists in the heavyweight papers...

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Lyndon B. Johnson, Dad and Me

In the end, it was no surprise that I turned to books in the aftermath of my father’s death; as much as anything else, a love of reading, and a confidence in the calming power of the written word,...

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The Nightmare of Room 101

It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen. That first arresting sentence of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four transports us immediately into a world that is real enough...

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Murder and Walnut Cake

‘For my son Tom. Since it was a vain attempt to match his prodigious literary output that got me into this situation in the first place.’ This slightly gushy (and therefore untypical)...

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Torrington’s Tours

The Great North Road, the A1, bypasses the villages that used to punctuate it and so misses out on the inns where John Byng, Lord Torrington, regularly used to stay on his touring holidays during the...

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The Torrington Diaries

There wasn’t space to include all the intriguing background information provided by Roger Hudson for his piece on ‘Torrington’s Tours’ which appeared in Issue 69. So we thought we’d share...

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Love at First Sight

At a loose end after university in the 1980s I went to Budapest to learn Hungarian. My teacher gave our group a Hungarian novel from which we studied passages in class. It was a slim book with an...

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Thank You, Dr Spock

A night in the autumn of 2002. I am woken by a scream which threatens to blow the chimneys off the house. I rush into the next room, pick up my 3-month-old son and do my best to comfort him. His tiny...

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Judgement Day

After a lifetime of teaching English literature, I have accumulated a private and rather eclectic pantheon of great (mainly modern) novels, in which J. L. Carr’s A Month in the Country holds a...

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Light in the Dark Ages

Nobody likes losing a pet. But for Owain it is the very last straw. His father and his older brother were killed in the last great battle against the invading Saxons, a battle which he himself barely...

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A Kind of Cosmic Refugee

Julia Strachey was a writer of rare talent and originality who, in a lifetime of writing, managed to complete and publish only two novels and a number of sketches and short stories. I knew nothing of...

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Walking for the Sun and the Wind

I think we can all agree on the restorative qualities of a country walk. Certainly, since I moved to Sussex, I have come to value walking as much more than a basic mode of transport, surrounded as I...

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Bruised, Shocked, but Elated

I first met Sybille Bedford in London in the early 1980s when an old friend of mine, Patrick Woodcock, who at the time was Sybille’s doctor, invited us both to dinner. As a keen admirer of...

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The Great Self-Examiner

Can anyone reconcile us with death? Michel de Montaigne, one of the great sages of the Renaissance, tried his best; and he was trying to reconcile himself as much as any readers he might have....

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Making a Meal of It

Plot: towards lunchtime, a male employee in a large corporate office building (the first-person narrator) discovers that the shoelace of his left shoe has snapped precisely twenty-eight hours after...

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Shelving My Assumptions

Last year, in response to a public consultation on the viability of my local public library, I offered to volunteer my unskilled services every Friday afternoon. This was my small way of signalling...

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Cover Artist: Slightly Foxed Issue 69, Niki Bowers, ‘“Spring Green” Tulips’

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