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: James Hamilton-Paterson follows a spy to Cairo • Trilby Kent shares a desk with Claudine • Dennis Butts finds poetry in the Second World War • James Roose-Evans sees Europe with Augustus Hare • Kate Berridge immerses herself in the Saturday Books • Charles Elliott enters the exquisite world of a Japanese courtier • Eric Brown celebrates a science-fiction writer • Catherine Merrick salutes Charles Darwin • Michael Barber admires an elderly mischief-maker . . .
An Editorial Peacock • KATE BERRIDGE on The Saturday Books
Learn-As-You-Burn • HAZEL WOOD on P. Y. Betts, People Who Say Goodbye
The Heroism of Ordinary Life • PETER J. CONRADI on Angus Wilson, The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot; Late Call
Welcome to Dictionopolis • ROHAN CANDAPPA on Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
Coney’s Islands • ERIC BROWN on Michael G. Coney, Syzygy; The Girl with a Symphony in Her Fingers; Hello Summer, Goodbye; Brontomek!
Eminently a Victorian • JAMES ROOSE-EVANS on Augustus Hare, Peculiar People: The Story of My Life
Goodbye to Berlin • JAMES HAMILTON-PATERSON on Joseph Hone, The Private Sector
Biophilia for Beginners • CATHERINE MERRICK on Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species
A Terrifying Business • PATRICK WELLAND on Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews; Shamela
The Sound of Raindrops • CHARLES ELLIOTT on Sei Shōnagon, The Pillow Book
Scandal at School • TRILBY KENT on Colette, Claudine at School; Claudine in Paris; Claudine Married; Claudine and Annie
The Fatal Gift of Phrase • MICHAEL BARBER on Gore Vidal, United States: Essays, 1952–1992; Palimpsest
Paradise Lost • JILL FOULSTON & ELISABETH RUSSELL TAYLOR on Robin Fedden, Chantesmesle
Seeking an Oasis • DENNIS BUTTS on The Oasis Trust (ed.), Return to Oasis; From Oasis into Italy; Poems of the Second World War; More Poems of the Second World War; The Schools Oasis; The Voice of War
On the Hungarian Plain • ANTHONY GARDNER on Kate Seredy, The Good Master; The Singing Tree
Hoppy Rides Again • TOM BROWN on Clarence E. Mulford’s Westerns
Comfort and Consolation • BILL TAYLOR on downsizing a library
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.
- Saturday Books, The
- Shōnagon, Sei
- Taylor, Bill
- Hone, Joseph
- Vidal, Gore
- Welland, Patrick
- Wood, Hazel
- Juster, Norton
- Wilson, Angus
- Kent, Trilby
- Oasis Poetry Collections, The
- Downsizing a library
- Pirkis, Gail & Wood, Hazel
- Barber, Michael
- Berridge, Kate
- Betts, P. Y.
- Brown, Eric
- Brown, Tom
- Butts, Dennis
- Campbell, Rebecca
- Candappa, Rohan
- Colette
- Coney, Michael G.
- Conradi, Peter J.
- Darwin, Charles
- Elliott, Charles
- Fedden, Robin
- Fielding, Henry
- Foulston, Jill
- Gardner, Anthony
- Hamilton-Paterson, James
- Hare, Augustus
- Merrick, Catherine
- Mulford, Clarence E.
- Roose-Evans, James
- Seredy, Kate
Slightly Foxed Issue 29: From the Editors
‘Spring, the sweet spring . . .’ The flower shop round the corner from Slightly Foxed is full of daffodils and hyacinths now, and from our window the City spires are standing out sharply against...
Read moreAn Editorial Peacock
When she is not sugar-soaping her skirting boards or throwing scrunched paper snowballs of unsatisfactory prose, Kate Berridge is writing a biographical novel based on the life of John Ruskin.
Read moreLearn-As-You-Burn
When Slightly Foxed was young, only a few issues old in fact, the writer Christopher Hawtree came to us with the story of P. Y. Betts and her childhood memoir People Who Say Goodbye. We loved the...
Read moreThe Heroism of Ordinary Life
Like many 15-year-olds I dreamt of understanding myself better. I knew my background was ‘bourgeois’ and thought I was probably gay. Did this mean that I ‘fitted in’? Or not? My English...
Read moreWelcome to Dictionopolis
I’m still impressed by rainbows, and this despite knowing about light, and refraction, and the unlikelihood of the existence of pots of gold. I see a rainbow and my heart soars. And for me, if a...
Read moreConey’s Islands
In a writing life stretching over thirty years, Michael G. Coney wrote nineteen science fiction novels and a single collection of short stories. Although his novels combined accessibility with fine...
Read moreEminently a Victorian
‘To tell the truth,’ wrote Augustus Hare, ‘had my books not been published, had The Story of My Life, and Memorials of a Quiet Life never seen the light of day, I should have missed even the...
Read moreGoodbye to Berlin
For a year or two in the Sixties, I would regularly stop off on my way home at the W. H. Smith by Earls Court station. Catering for so many well placed commuters, it was a reliable showcase of...
Read moreBiophilia for Beginners
Until my early twenties, I had never really thought about Darwin. I was halfway through a doctorate in biology by then, so in retrospect this seems like a glaring omission. Naturally, I had thought...
Read moreA Terrifying Business
My erratic education included one year at a technical college, before it was agreed I leave on the grounds that I was incorrigibly idle. It was 1964, I was 16 and after three suffocating years at a...
Read moreScandal at School
Among the jumble of postcards, newspaper clippings, maps and to-do lists that cram the walls around my desk is a school photograph. The occasion was the annual fair at which a group of us had...
Read moreThe Fatal Gift of Phrase
In the age of the common man, said Malcolm Muggeridge, we all want to be uncommon, and they don’t come more uncommon than Gore Vidal, a writer for whom the term sui generis might have been coined....
Read moreHoppy Rides Again
A favourite photograph of one of my grandsons shows him astride his rocking-horse, wearing one of my old hats, a rifle and a pistol in his tiny hands and the reins between his teeth – a miniature...
Read moreParadise Lost
A lyrical hymn to the irrecoverable past, Robin Fedden’s memoir Chantemesle takes its title from the house in which he grew up, itself named after a tiny hamlet in the Île de France. Over the...
Read moreSeeking an Oasis
We come to war from many different directions. My own experiences are probably similar to those of some Slightly Foxed readers: a father who survived, just, serving in the trenches in the Great War...
Read moreOn the Hungarian Plain
As a child I was always reassured by books which contained maps. The Hobbit, Treasure Island, Prince Caspian – their neatly drawn coastlines, mountains and compass points were promises of worlds...
Read moreComfort and Consolation
Faced with the prospect of moving into a new eco-house at the bottom of our garden I have begun to realize that I must downsize my library – which is what I like to call it: a collection of many...
Read more
