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
Grant McIntyre gets caught up in A Dance to the Music of Time • William Palmer raises a glass to Dickens • Julia Keay falls in love with Georgette Heyer • Roger Hudson revisits Kilvert • Michele Hanson quizzes D.H. Lawrence • Jeremy Noel-Tod celebrates 1066 (and all that) • Derek Parker goes Thurber-hunting • Duncan Minshull walks on ice • Antony Wood enjoys the inspired idiocy of the clerihew, and much more besides . . .
For Pheasant Read Peasant • JEREMY NOEL-TOD
W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman, 1066 and All That
The Power of Stealing Hearts • ROGER HUDSON
Francis Kilvert, Diary
Yes, Yes, Sir Jasper! • JULIA KEAY
On the novels of Georgette Heyer
Legging It for Lotte • DUNCAN MINSHULL
Werner Herzog, Of Walking in Ice
Strangely Like Real Life • GRANT MCINTYRE
Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time
Dining in Parnassus • JOHN SAUMAREZ SMITH
Holbrook Jackson, Bookman’s Holiday
A Whiff of Sulphur • MALCOLM GLUCK
Leonardo Sciascia, To Each His Own
Bentley Gently • ANTONY WOOD
On the clerihews of E. C. Bentley
The Ruthless Truth of War • CHRISTIAN TYLER
On the novels of Vasily Grossman
Needy Authors, Literary Hacks • PAUL ROUTLEDGE
George Gissing, New Grub Street
Praisethurber • DEREK PARKER
James Thurber, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty; My Life and Hard Times
Learning to Swaller It • OLIVIA LAING
Rumer Godden, The Diddakoi
Lucky Alec • MICHAEL BARBER
On the novels of Alec Waugh
The Smoking Bishop • WILLIAM PALMER
On drinking and drunkenness in Dickens
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.
- Kilvert, Francis
- Laing, Olivia
- Bookshops and bookselling
- Simmonds, Posy
- Drinking and drunkenness in Dickens
- Smith, John Saumarez
- Pirkis, Gail & Wood, Hazel
- Thurber, James
- Beevor, Antony & Vinogradova, Luba
- Tyler, Christian
- Garrard, John & Carol
- Hudson, Roger
- Jackson, Holbrook
- Waugh, Alec
- Morris, Peter M.
- Keay, Julia
- Yeatman, R. J., & Sellar, W. C.
- Wood, Antony
- Barber, Michael
- Bentley, E. C.
- Gissing, George
- Gluck, Malcolm
- Godden, Rumer
- Grossman, Vasily
- McIntyre, Grant
- Minshull, Duncan
- Herzog, Werner
- Heyer, Georgette
- Noel-Tod, Jeremy
- Palmer, William
- Parker, Derek
- Pope-Hennessy, Una
- Powell, Anthony
- Routledge, Paul
- Sciascia, Leonardo
- Sellar, W. C., & Yeatman, R. J.
Slightly Foxed Issue 16: From the Editors
With mist obscuring the dome of St Paul’s and winter closing in, it seems a long time since we were driving through lush, sunlit Devon lanes to the launch of the Autumn issue at the (tiny) Big Red...
Read moreStrangely Like Real Life
My own prime favourite is Anthony Powell’s sequence of novels A Dance to the Music of Time: panoramic, sharply observed, farcical, ironic, yet shot through with what Kingsley Amis called an...
Read moreYes, Yes, Sir Jasper!
I am a Georgette Heyer fan. There. In the full knowledge that many, probably most, of those who consider themselves serious readers will react to such a statement with a disdainful curl of the lip,...
Read moreThe Power of Stealing Hearts
Not a little of the appeal of Kilvert’s Diary for its early readership was the total contrast it provided to contemporary horrors. What could offer a better escape than the largely unruffled...
Read moreFor Pheasant Read Peasant
1066 and All That is a book that for me gleams so strongly with the same spirit of redress as to be a work of satirical genius. This is, I know, a little stronger than the usual estimate of Sellar...
Read moreLegging It for Lotte
Werner Herzog, the German film-maker, was friends with the late Chatwin (on the subject of walking they once compared legs together). He is known for such expansive and luminous works as Aguirre,...
Read moreDining in Parnassus
Second-hand booksellers often find the reading of their books not just an occupational hazard but a waste of their precious time. They would rather spend it on keeping up with auction prices, reading...
Read moreA Whiff of Sulphur
When an Italian friend recommended a Sicilian writer of detective fiction called Leonardo Sciascia (and pronounced, in the author’s island dialect, as sash-arr), I listened politely but...
Read moreBentley Gently
One of the literary forms that has always given me most pleasure, in between the serious stuff, has been the clerihew, named after its inventor Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875–1956). Bentley was...
Read moreThe Ruthless Truth of War
Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union I was invited to join a private train for its first – and, as it proved, only – excursion, from St Petersburg to Tashkent. Things in Russia had...
Read moreNeedy Authors, Literary Hacks
In a tiny seventeenth-century cottage, fashioned from stone stables, I found the Idle Bookseller. Not that Ros Stinton lives up to her trade name, presiding as she does over the largest collection of...
Read moreLearning to Swaller It
The best days of my childhood were spent in a borrowed horse-drawn wagon, ricocheting up and down the semi-sheer slopes of the Wicklow Mountains, reins firmly grasped in small hands. I loved...
Read morePraisethurber
Not too many years ago, it would have been unnecessary to explain who James Thurber was. His short story ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty’, published in 1947 in the New Yorker (where most of his...
Read moreLucky Alec
‘Which would you rather be,’ asked Maurice Richardson, ‘a shit of genius or a chronic euphoric?’ The shit of genius was Evelyn Waugh, the chronic euphoric his elder brother Alec, who once...
Read moreThe Smoking Bishop
In one way, Dickens was not a Victorian. He was born in 1812 and his formative years were spent under the Regency, then the reigns of George IV and William IV. By the time of Victoria’s coronation,...
Read more
