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A Set of Slightly Foxed Paperbacks
Priscilla-Napier-A-Late-Beginner---Slightly-Foxed-Paperback
V. S. Pritchett-A-Cab-at-the-Door---Slightly-Foxed-Paperback
Frances-Wood,-Hand-grenade-Practice-in-Peking---Slightly-Foxed-Paperback
  • Dimensions: 170 x 110mm
  • Producer: Smith Settle
  • Genre: Memoir
  • Binding: Sewn paperback
  • Trimmings: French flaps
Made in Britain

A Set of Slightly Foxed Paperbacks

Priscilla Napier, V. S. Pritchett, Frances Wood
From£18

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Our popular Slightly Foxed Paperbacks are perfect for slotting into a coat pocket or bag, and make charming presents. Delightful to look at, pocket-sized and elegantly produced on good cream paper, they give you a chance to acquire some of the original hardbacks you may have missed.

Now is your chance to catch up with a set of three of our available paperbacks. The set includes:

Priscilla Napier, A Late Beginner

Priscilla Napier grew up in Egypt during the last golden years of the Edwardian Age. Here she brings to life that far-off world – the house and its devoted Egyptian servants, the desert picnics with Nanny, the visits to Cairo Zoo, the afternoons playing in the grounds of the Gezira Sporting Club – and the long summers in England among their mother’s family, as the First World War began to take its tragic toll of uncles and cousins. It is a wonderful evocation of a place, a time and a climate of mind – a book that, as Penelope Lively writes in her preface, ‘ranks quite simply with the greatest accounts of how it is to be a child’.

V. S. Pritchett, A Cab at the Door

The writer V. S. Pritchett’s mother was an irrepressible cockney, his father a reckless, over-optimistic peacock of a man, always embarking on new business ventures which inevitably crashed – hence the ‘cab at the door’ waiting to bear the family quietly away from yet another set of creditors. In this vigorous and original memoir Pritchett captures unforgettably the smells, sounds and voices of London in the first decades of the 20th century, and the cast of Dickensian characters among whom he grew up.

Frances Wood, Hand-grenade Practice in Peking

China in 1975 was a strange, undiscovered country, still half-mad from Mao’s Cultural Revolution, when young Frances Wood boarded a plane in London to study for a year in Peking. Virtually closed to outsiders for the preceding decade, China was just beginning to make tentative moves towards the outside world when Frances and her fellow students were driven through the dark silent countryside to their new quarters at the Foreign Languages Institute. Throughout the following year in an extraordinary Alice-in-Wonderland world where ‘education’ consisted of shovelling rubble, hand-grenade practice and cripplingly tedious ideological lectures, Frances never lost her sense of humour. Based on the letters she wrote home, Hand-grenade Practice in Peking is both affecting and hilarious.



Pocket-sized and elegantly produced | Slightly Foxed Paperbacks

Our popular Slightly Foxed Paperbacks are perfect for slotting into a coat pocket or bag, and make charming presents. Delightful to look at, pocket-sized and elegantly produced on good cream paper,...

Read more

Perfectly Pocketable | Slightly Foxed Paperbacks

Our popular Slightly Foxed Paperbacks are perfect for slotting into a coat pocket or bag, and make charming presents. Delightful to look at, pocket-sized and elegantly produced on good cream paper...

Read more

Avid to Live and Learn

I shall always be grateful to A Cab at the Door. I read most of it one Sunday evening in a Victoria line tube train which was stuck for two hours outside King’s Cross station. The train lights...

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Before the Sun Set

This wonderful recreation of a time and a climate of mind – a hundred years ago, one realizes, startled – is not just an evocation of place but also of the child’s eye view. A Late Beginner...

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‘Tombs, dear. Where’s your other sock?’

No one told me that the pyramids had been one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, but they were certainly the primal wonder of mine. From early on they exercised an oddly persistent...

Read more

Too Much of a Good Thing

I see Frances Wood in that great tradition of intrepid British women explorers, like Mary Kingsley and Gertrude Bell. She sets out for China in 1975, when the Cultural Revolution is still going...

Read more

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