In this issue
Jim Ring solves a riddle • Frances Wood shares her thoughts on paper • James Bartholomew clicks with Cuthbert • Trilby Kent goes into Purgatory • Richard Davies meets a laughing diplomat • Eric Brown discovers a sensual world • Sarah Harrison decodes publishers’ blurbs • Roger Jones returns to Walden • Trevor Fishlock takes to the skies • John de Falbe celebrates Alan Ross’s war, and much more besides . . .
Well Done, Carruthers! • JIM RING
Erskine Childers, The Riddle of the Sands
The Perfect Spy • FRANCES DONNELLY
Graham Greene, A Sort of Life
Lives on the Edge • FRANK HERRMANN
H. A. Manhood, Night Seed; Gay Agony; Apples by Night; Crack of Whips; Fierce and Gentle; Sunday Bugles; Lunatic Broth; Selected Stories; A Long View of Nothing
Smiling Through • RICHARD DAVIES
Daniele Varè, Laughing Diplomat
Academic Angst • JOSIE BARNARD
Ivy Compton-Burnett, Pastors and Masters; Malcolm Bradbury, The History Man
A Sensual but Secret World • ERIC BROWN
Rupert Croft-Cooke’s The Sensual World series
An Extraordinary Ordinary Man • RICHARD PLATT
Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice and History; As I Remember Him: The Biography of RS
Down in the Mayfair Badlands • D. J. TAYLOR
Roger Longrigg, A High-Pitched Buzz
The Well-Connected Letter-Writer • MARIE FORSYTH
Madame de Sévigné, Selected Letters
On the North West Frontier • BRUCE COWARD
Wallace Breem, The Leopard and the Cliff; Eagle in the Snow; The Legate’s Daughter
High Flyer • TREVOR FISHLOCK
Winifred Loraine, Robert Loraine, Soldier, Actor, Airman
Thoreau’s Axe • ROGER JONES
Henry Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods
Writers at Sea • JOHN DE FALBE
Alan Ross, Blindfold Games; Frank Kermode, Not Entitled
If at First • JAMES BARTHOLOMEW
P. G. Wodehouse, The Clicking of Cuthbert; Heart of a Goof
Not so Merry England • ALEXANDER LUCIE-SMITH
Walter Scott, Ivanhoe
A Season in Purgatory • TRILBY KENT
Geoffrey Pyke, To Ruhleben – And Back: A Great Adventure in Three Phases
The Oldest Paper in the World • FRANCES WOOD
The Diamond Sutra
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. More . . .
- Barnard, Josie
- Bartholomew, James
- Bradbury, Malcolm
- Breem, Wallace
- Brown, Eric
- Childers, Erskine
- Compton-Burnett, Ivy
- Coward, Bruce
- Croft-Cooke, Rupert
- Davies, Richard
- De Falbe, John
- De Sévigné, Madame
- Diamond Sutra, The
- Donnelly, Frances
- Fishlock, Trevor
- Forsyth, Marie
- Greene, Graham
- Herrmann, Frank
- Jones, Roger
- Kent, Trilby
- Kermode, Frank
- Lewin, Angie
- Longrigg, Roger
- Loraine, Winifred
- Lucie-Smith, Alexander
- Manhood, H. A.
- Paper
- Pirkis, Gail & Wood, Hazel
- Platt, Richard
- Pyke, Geoffrey
- Ring, Jim
- Ross, Alan
- Scott, Walter
- Taylor, D. J.
- Thoreau, Henry
- Varè, Daniele
- Wodehouse, P. G.
- Wood, Frances
- Zinsser, Hans
The Oldest Paper in the World
It is not surprising that having invented paper over 2,000 years ago, the Chinese found a wide variety of ways to use it. Though the seventeenth-century landscape artist and arbiter of taste, Wen...
Read moreWell Done, Carruthers!
In the depths of last winter the bathroom, if by no means warm, was the least glacial room in the house. Ever since the children were born it’s also been the only place in our North Norfolk home in...
Read moreThe Perfect Spy
‘I have tried, however unsuccessfully, to live again the follies and sentimentalities and exaggerations of the distant time, and to feel them, as I felt them then, without irony,’ wrote Graham...
Read moreLives on the Edge
One of the great advantages of running an auction house for books is that you see a vast range of publications. And if you’ve been a publisher for many years before you became an auctioneer, you...
Read moreSmiling Through
Some years ago I found myself acting as Her Majesty’s Permanent Representative to the Economic and Social Commission for Asia-Pacific (ESCAP), a United Nations talking-shop based in Bangkok. There...
Read moreA Sensual but Secret World
I came across the book quite by chance one bitterly cold February day in the early Eighties, in a junk shop in the Brontë village of Haworth. It was a tatty copy of The Drums of Morning by Rupert...
Read moreAcademic Angst
It was on just such a holiday that I came to read Ivy Compton- Burnett’s Pastors and Masters and Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man in quick succession. And since one is the predecessor of the...
Read moreAn Extraordinary Ordinary Man
Hans Zinsser is stalking a murderer. His quarry has terrified hapless victims for centuries, coming upon them suddenly, by stealth, with overwhelming power and agility, sending whole cities into...
Read moreDown in the Mayfair Badlands
In strict taxonomic terms, Roger Longrigg’s long career – he published novels for over half his seven decades on the planet – looks like a throw-back, a reversion to the high-output conditions...
Read moreThe Well-Connected Letter-Writer
Long ago, as a student, I was told to read the letters of Madame de Sévigné to get a better understanding of seventeenth-century French history. Now that exams are far behind me, I wonder how many...
Read moreOn the North West Frontier
Wallace Breem is one of those authors who, if he is remembered at all, is probably known only for his first novel, Eagle in the Snow, which received high praise and achieved excellent sales on its...
Read moreHigh Flyer
Robert Loraine was a magnificent man in a flying machine. I first encountered his story in an Anglesey meadow where he had two of his many crashes. Soon afterwards I chanced on a biography of him in...
Read moreThoreau’s Axe
In 1973, my wife and I left a flat in St John’s Wood for a decrepit 5-acre smallholding in West Wales. There we continued, in cheerful penury, for the next twelve years. ‘Back in the days’, as...
Read moreWriters at Sea
A friend recently urged me to read Frank Kermode’s memoir Not Entitled – not for the account of a supremely successful academic career in the second half of the twentieth century, nor for...
Read moreIf at First
A few years ago I was still managing to keep my mother – elderly and frail – living in her own home, which was what she wanted. But she had a collection of medical problems any one of which could...
Read moreNot so Merry England
Ivanhoe is the one novel by Sir Walter Scott that needs to be discovered twice – if, that is, you first encountered it at school, as I did. To me then the plot seemed overcomplicated, and the whole...
Read moreA Season in Purgatory
It seemed as good a time as any to tackle what remained of my stack of Christmas books, and so, bundled in an unlikely assortment of layers, complete with babushka headscarf and mitts, I reached for...
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