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Slightly Foxed Issue 23
  • ISBN: 9781906562120
  • Pages: 96
  • Dimensions: 210 x 148mm
  • Illustrations: B/W
  • Publication date: 1 September 2009
  • Producer: Smith Settle
  • Cover artist: Gary Bunt, ‘Home’
  • ISSN: 1742-5794
Made in Britain

Slightly Foxed Issue 23

‘Social Climbing’

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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

Amanda Theunissen heads for Chinese Turkestan • Alice O’Keeffe goes Cuban • Jeremy Lewis unearths the missing will • Ashley Harrold celebrates a very minor poet • Michele Hanson trails after Humphry Clinker • C. J. Wright saves the Punch table for the nation • Linda Leatherbarrow finds food for free • Jeremy Noel-Tod and Robert Macfarlane go night-climbing in Cambridge, and much more besides . . .


Social Climbing • JEREMY NOEL-TOD & ROBERT MACFARLANE

On The Night Climbers of Cambridge

A Chequered Career • JEREMY LEWIS

Michael Wharton, The Missing Will

Down and Out in Havana • ALICE O’KEEFFE

Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, Dirty Havana Trilogy

Mr Smith Goes to Arcadia • RICHARD PLATT

Alexander Smith, Dreamthorp: A Book of Essays Written in the Country

Optimistic Green Flags • LINDA LEATHERBARROW

Richard Mabey, Food for Free

Stinks and Germs • MICHELE HANSON

Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker

Imaginative Leaps • DUNCAN MINSHULL

Peter Schneider, The Wall Jumper

None of Her Business • SIMON LAWRENCE

On the novels of Sarah Caudwell

A Most Unusual Memsahib • AMANDA THEUNISSEN

Lady Macartney, An English Lady in Chinese Turkestan

Between Two Worlds • A. E. ROBERTS

Alan Garner, Elidor

Just Getting on with It • A. F. HARROLD

William Cowper, Selected Poems

Silly Suffolk • BRANWEN LUCAS

Julian Tennyson, Suffolk Scene

Chips with Everything • ANDREW MARTIN

On the books of Stephen Potter

Departed Grandeur • LUCY LETHBRIDGE

Roderick Grant, Strathalder

Straw Hat with Red Plaits • DAISY HAY

On the novels of L. M. Montgomery

Confessions of a Manuscripts Curator • C. J. WRIGHT

On Manuscripts


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 23: From the Editors

The summer seems to have flown by, with nothing more dramatic to report from the Slightly Foxed office than the theft of Jennie’s bike (two sturdy locks and all – that’s London for you) and the...

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Aldeburgh Beach

Branwen Lucas explores the towns, villages and coast of Suffolk with Julian Tennyson’s Suffolk Scene, a ‘sparkling record of his love affair with this often neglected part of East Anglia’. Her...

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Social Climbing

When I was an undergraduate at Oxford, a friend was billeted at the top of the tall college gatehouse. The stairs to her room were so many that, in case of fire, a long rope, bolted to the wall and...

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A Chequered Career

I got to know Michael Wharton in the early 1980s, when I was working as an editor at Chatto & Windus. We had commissioned him to write what turned out to be The Missing Will, the first volume of his...

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Down and Out in Havana

I knew what I wanted, and I went to Havana to find it. It was the university summer holidays. England was one long yawn, with its slow drizzle and its Third Way, the flat vowels of its politicians...

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Mr Smith Goes to Arcadia

In 1938, with the gloriously musical literary voices of Victoria’s reign just fading from living memory, Oxford University Press published English Prose of the Victorian Era. The table of contents...

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Optimistic Green Flags

This morning, in the woods on Tooting Common, the sight of a young man plucking nettles and dropping them into a forage bag instantly reconnected me to my earlier life where ‘found food’ was a...

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Stinks and Germs

Last year I was invited to join a friend’s book group. I plodded through the book they’d chosen that week – a particularly ghastly and badly written effort by some minor celebrity – and...

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Imaginative Leaps

The Berlin Wall, a brutal, iconic structure made of concrete and barbed-wire, rose to split a city overnight in August 1961. Then just as quickly, and again overnight, it was breached in November...

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None of Her Business

Sarah Caudwell is the author of some of the most gloriously entertaining comic novels written since the war, but she seems to be almost unknown in this country. My relatives and friends have not...

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A Most Unusual Memsahib

The verb ‘to travel’ could be parsed like this: I’m a traveller, you’re a tourist, he’s a tripper. Most of us, including me, are tourists, condemned to the soul-destroying procedures of...

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Between Two Worlds

I came late to magic. The stories of my childhood were mainly Greek myths (there was a Cyclops at the bottom of our garden) or the plots – with copious quotations – of Jane Austen’s novels, my...

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Just Getting on with It

I remember hearing Leonard Cohen being interviewed some years ago, and he said, when asked whether he minded being referred to as a ‘minor poet’, that no he didn’t mind at all, in fact he had...

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Silly Suffolk

The year 2004 was what I shall call my ‘Suffolk Year’, one in which I immersed myself in Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes through a workshop and performance at Covent Garden and a concert...

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Chips with Everything

I first encountered the work of Stephen Potter in a TV sketch show that conflated the great comedy quartet of his ‘Upmanship’ books: The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship, Lifemanship,...

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Departed Grandeur

There are few things more guaranteed to provoke a pleasurable wallow in melancholy than a ruin. For me, exiled in Brooklyn, with temperatures rising, the air-conditioner on the blink and police...

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Straw Hat with Red Plaits

Last summer, during a trip to Canada’s maritime provinces, my husband and I went on a literary pilgrimage. After attending a wedding in Nova Scotia we drove northwards across the Confederation...

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Confessions of a Manuscripts Curator

Literary manuscripts began to be collected in the eighteenth century – though in the case of Shakespeare, none of whose handwriting was known to survive, with the exception of a few signatures, all...

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