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 Perry recalls the strange story of the novel that escaped from Dartmoor • Sue Gee discovers a great crime novel in Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Mr Tod • David Wheeler is touched by an account of the garden the exiled Napoleon created on St Helena • Michele Hanson feels much better about herself after encountering the hero of Howard Jacobson’s Coming from Behind • Justin Cartwright reflects on the significance of animals in fiction • Frances Wood visits Lhasa with Sherlock Holmes • Jill Paton Walsh is bewitched by the story of An Attic in Greece • Hazel Wood enjoys the childhood memories of a very unusual duchess • Rachel Campbell-Johnston listens in to J.H. Prynne • Anthony Sattin takes a Beer in the Snooker Club with the Egyptian novelist Waguih Ghali, and much more besides . . .
Kindred Spirits • LIZ ROBINSON
Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris
Bricks and Mortars • JILL PATON WALSH
Austen Kark, Attic in Greece
The Trouble with Sefton • MICHELE HANSON
Howard Jacobson, Coming from Behind
Listening in to Prynne • RACHEL CAMPBELL-JOHNSTON
J. H. Prynne, Poems
Beguiling • MARY SULLIVAN
Henry Green, Pack My Bag
The Chinese Book • SUSAN LEIPER
On Chinese book format
Napoleon’s Last Garden • DAVID WHEELER
Julia Blackburn, The Emperor’s Last Island
Cutting it Fine • ANNE BOSTON
Penelope Fitzgerald, The Beginning of Spring
A Writer’s Bestiary • JUSTIN CARTWRIGHT
On animals in fiction
Potter’s Dark Materials • SUE GEE
Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Mr Tod
In the North Woods • BELINDA HOLLYER
Jennifer Donnelly, A Gathering Light
Uneasy in Brooklyn • JENNY BAYNES
Paula Fox, Desperate Characters
City of Impregnation • JOHN KEAY
Krishna Dutta, Calcutta: A Cultural and Literary History
A Publisher in Bloomsbury • HAZEL WOOD
From Chelsea to Belsize Park • SIMON BRETT
Denis Mackail, Greenery Street; Anna Gmeyner, Manja
One Hot Night in Cairo • ANTHONY SATTIN
Waguih Ghali, Beer in the Snooker Club
By Ancient Ways • DUFF HART-DAVIS
Candida Lycett-Green, Over the Hills and Far Away
Sex and Salvation • CHRISTIAN TYLER
Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco
With Holmes in Tibet • FRANCES WOOD
Jamyang Norbu, The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes
Backwards up the Orinoco • RIVERS SCOTT
Alejo Carpentier, The Lost Steps
Scorpions on the Mantelpiece • HAZEL WOOD
Suzanne St Albans, Mango and Mimosa
Crusading for Cary • SYLVESTER STEIN
Joyce Cary, The Horse’s Mouth; Mister Johnson
A Hanging in Wandsworth • PETER HOPKIRK
Stewart McLoughlin, Wandsworth Prison
The Novel that Escaped from Dartmoor • ANTHONY PERRY
On plagiarism
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.
- Wood, Hazel
- Tyler, Christian
- Leiper, Susan
- Bookplates
- Kark, Austen
- Walsh, Jill Paton
- Kazantzakis, Nikos
- Chinese Book Format
- Animals in fiction
- Persephone Books
- Pirkis, Gail & Wood, Hazel
- Plagiarism
- Publishers
- Stein, Sylvester
- Slightly Foxed, launch of
- Sullivan, Mary
- Jacobson, Howard
- Hollyer, Belinda
- Wheeler, David
- Hopkirk, Peter
- Baynes, Jenny
- Blackburn, Julia
- Boston, Anne
- Brett, Simon
- Campbell-Johnston, Rachel
- Carpentier, Alejo
- Cartwright, Justin
- Cary, Joyce
- Donnelly, Jennifer
- Dutta, Krishna
- Fadiman, Anne
- Fitzgerald, Penelope
- Fox, Paula
- Gee, Sue
- Ghali, Waguih
- Gmeyner, Anna
- Green, Henry
- Greene, Graham
- Hanson, Michele
- Lycett-Green, Candida
- Mackail, Denis
- Hart-Davis, Duff
- McLoughlin, Stewart
- Norbu, Jamyang
- Perry, Anthony
- Potter, Beatrix
- Prynne, J. H.
- Robinson, Liz
- St Albans, Suzanne
- Sattin, Anthony
- Scott, Rivers
Slightly Foxed Issue 1: From the Editors
Welcome to the first issue of Slightly Foxed, the magazine for adventurous readers – people who want to explore beyond the familiar territory of the national review pages and magazines, and who are...
Read moreKindred Spirits
Do you treasure ancient paperbacks, spines gone, pages browning, brittle and crumbling, held together (or not quite) with perished elastic bands, simply because you also treasure the memories they...
Read morePotter’s Dark Materials
Set in a brooding Cumberland landscape of crags, empty dwellings and moonlit woodland, the characters, menacing atmosphere and plot of Mr Tod have all the hallmarks of classic crime fiction –...
Read moreBricks and Mortars
In the early 1960s, Austen Kark was travelling in Greece in the Greek Prime Minister’s second-best car, driven by the second-best chauffeur. The visit was part of his duties as Head of the BBC...
Read moreThe Trouble with Sefton
Several years ago I described my mother’s and aunties’ interior decor as Hove Jewish Baroque Rococo and thought myself rather amusing. Then I read Howard Jacobson’s Coming from Behind. His...
Read moreListening in to Prynne
J. H. Prynne is probably the most significant poet writing in Britain today. But he might as well have penned the complete weasel trapper’s manual as far as most people are concerned. This isn’t...
Read moreBeguiling
Like Charles Lamb trying all his life to like Scotsmen, for forty years I wanted to enjoy the nine novels of Henry Green. They have such beguiling one-word titles – Loving, Living, Doting,...
Read moreThe Chinese Book
Following the dictum of the famous German calligrapher Friedrich Neugebauer, that ‘the ideal manuscript book would be made by one person, acting as author, scribe, illuminator and binder’, Susan...
Read moreNapoleon’s Last Garden
The bright orange spine of The Emperor’s Last Island shone conspicuously. The author’s name didn’t register, but the powerful word ‘island’ most certainly did, and when I took the slim...
Read moreCutting it Fine
Early twentieth-century Moscow is the setting for The Beginning of Spring, indeed its central presence. To Frank Reid, émigré printer’s son, its weird bureaucracy, endemic espionage and...
Read moreA Writer’s Bestiary
A few months ago I was giving a talk to a group of students. Afterwards one of them asked if the baboon relationship in my book White Lightning has anything to do with Jody’s fated relationship...
Read moreIn the North Woods
Jennifer Donnelly has perfect pitch as a writer, which is an enviable talent, especially in a first novel. But then, this is an exceptional novel. I read it six months ago, and in the way of books...
Read moreUneasy in Brooklyn
I feel blessed to have discovered Paula Fox. Her Desperate Characters is one of those novels that, because of its clarity and compression, makes an almost physical impact on you. Instantly absorbed...
Read moreCity of Impregnation
In her foreword to Krishna Dutta’s Calcutta, the novelist Anita Desai mentions how visitors from that city, on unpacking in the dry air of her Delhi home, invariably release a distinctive odour....
Read moreA Publisher in Bloomsbury
There is a determinedly un-modern feel to the grey-fronted shop-cum- office of Persephone Books in Lamb’s Conduit Street, a leafy Georgian oasis not far from the British Museum. A blue and white...
Read moreFrom Chelsea to Belsize Park
One of the first books I was ever given was Sycamore Square. It was old for a toddler, but a pretty thing to grow into: light verse, which had mostly first appeared in Punch. Ernest Shepard’s...
Read moreOne Hot Night in Cairo
In the spring of 1987, just as I was making preparations for a lengthy research trip to Egypt, I was sent two books. The first was the wonderfully titled Beer in the Snooker Club, a novel by Waguih...
Read moreBy Ancient Ways
When I first came across Over the Hills and Far Away I was immediately enchanted by this magical mixture of a book. Ostensibly it tells of a long-distance ride through the north of England, made to...
Read moreSex and Salvation
Kazantzakis was a writer whose inner life was devoted to the struggle between flesh and spirit. Although he came within a whisker of winning a Nobel Prize in 1952, his name meant nothing to me when I...
Read moreWith Holmes in Tibet
Having recently listened to the complete Sherlock Holmes stories on audiotape (they improved the school run no end), I was bound to be curious when The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes first appeared. It...
Read moreBackwards up the Orinoco
I have to admit it. I am a sucker for novels in which a key element is the passage of time – Buddenbrooks, The Old Wives’ Tale, The Forsyte Saga, I name just three old standbys. And then, first...
Read moreScorpions on the Mantelpiece
Sometime in 1999 a light editing job dropped through my letterbox – ‘a new edition of a memoir by the Duchess of St Albans’, the publisher had said on the phone. Preparing myself for some...
Read moreCrusading for Cary
The novelist Joyce Cary shall never be forgotten, I have vowed, upon the heads of his two grandest characters, Gulley Jimson the English painter, and Mister Johnson the Nigerian clerk.
Read moreA Hanging in Wandsworth
During my early Fleet Street years, in the 195o’s, we hacks were chillingly familiar with the grim ritual of hanging. I still remember with a shudder having to wait outside Wandsworth or some other...
Read moreThe Novel that Escaped from Dartmoor
In 1963 a convict serving a four-year sentence in Dartmoor for car theft thought he would write a novel. He called his book Young and Sensitive and described it as ‘a tender novel of awakening love...
Read more
Slightly Foxed leads to so many absorbing avenues of interest that I am overwhelmed with choices of books, authors and associated warrens to plunge down. A wonderful publication; you are to be congratulated on organizing such inspired, gracious, civilized, diverse and intriguing contributions.
My husband and I are now thoroughly addicted to Slightly Foxed and fight (in a subtle and civilized manner) over each issue when it arrives.
Thank you – you are doing a great job! Hope to visit you one of these days.
Discovering SF was rather like meeting someone for the first time but feeling that somehow you’ve met before. Some sixty years ago when an art student opting for book illustration as a main subject I loved the handling of well produced books – that must have been when I met you before!
Everyone who’s anyone is reading Slightly Foxed. They used to think that SF stood for science fiction, or even Stephen Fry. But not any more.
Here’s to many more excellent editions of SF!