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: Christian Tyler travels Among the Believers with V. S. Naipaul • Rachel Campbell-Johnston confronts Nostromo • Trevor Fishlock puts to sea with Joshua Slocum • Jane Gardam admires Anne Schlee’s light touch • Derwent May tours Italy with Ruskin • Tim Longville hears distant voices from America’s deep south • Hazel Wood visits an adventurous small publisher • Christopher Bird meets a young doctor in pre-Revolutionary Russia • Anne Boston finds herself spellbound on The Wilder Shores of Love • Paul Willetts goes in search of Julian Maclaren-Ross • Julia Keay compiles an index while journeying up the Mekong • Linda Leatherbarrow hears distant harmonies, and much more besides . . .
Sharks, Otters and Fast Cars • ARIANE BANKES on Douglas Botting, The Saga of Ring of Bright Water
Special Deliveries • CHRISTOPHER BIRD on Mikhail Bulgakov, A Country Doctor’s Notebook
Distant Harmonies • LINDA LEATHERBARROW on Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Music at Long Verney
Seeds of Friendship • TIM LONGVILLE on Elizabeth Lawrence, Gardening for Love
Mining Conrad • RACHEL CAMPBELL-JOHNSTON on Joseph Conrad, Nostromo
Trouble at Mill • CLIVE UNGER-HAMILTON on Sabine Baring-Gould, Cheap Jack Zita
Landscape and the Heart • ANNE BOSTON on the works of Lesley Blanch
Holding the Pass to Paradise • CHRISTIAN TYLER on V. S. Naipaul, Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey
Imam with a Mission • MATTHEW J. REISZ on Rifa‘a Rafi‘ al-Tahtawi, An Imam in Paris
Leap of Imagination • JOHN DE FALBE on Colum McCann, Dancer
The Chinese Book II • SUSAN LEIPER on Chinese book format
Well-salted • TREVOR FISHLOCK on Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone Around the World
False Bottoms • FRANCIS KING on Wyndham Lewis, The Revenge for Love
Not So Much a Business . . . • HAZEL WOOD on Eland Books
Belated Reparation • JEREMY LEWIS on Janina David, A Square of Sky
Revelling with Ruskin • DERWENT MAY on John Ruskin, Praeterita
Marriage Lines • HAZEL WOOD on Cauvery Madhavan, The Uncoupling
The Salesman Only Rings Once • PAUL WILLETTS on Julian Maclaren-Ross, Of Love and Hunger
Daughter in Residence • JANE GARDAM on Ann Schlee, The Time in Aderra
Indexing on the Mekong • JULIA KEAY on indexing
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.
- Eland Books
- Shelton, Richard
- Shirley Smith, Richard
- Slocum, Joshua
- Sutcliff, Rosemary
- Hoskins, W. G.
- Warner, Sylvia Townsend
- Willetts, Paul
- King, Francis
- Lawrence, Elizabeth
- Leatherbarrow, Linda
- Lewis, [Percy] Wyndham
- Indexing
- Pirkis, Gail & Wood, Hazel
- Baring-Gould, Sabine
- Al-Tahtawi, Rifa‘a Rafı‘
- Birch, Dinah
- Blanch, Lesley
- Botting, Douglas
- Bulgakov, Mikhail
- Connolly, Cyril
- Conrad, Joseph
- David, Janina
- Frayn, Michael
- Gardam, Jane
- Hannah, Jonny
- McCann, Colum
- Maclaren-Ross, Julian
- Madhavan, Cauvery
- Márai, Sándor
- May, Derwent
- Monsarrat, Nicholas
- Naipaul, V. S.
- Nesbit, E.
- Ruskin, John
- Schlee, Ann
Slightly Foxed Issue 3: From the Editors
Since Slightly Foxed was launched, its office has been comfortably sited in Canonbury, a quiet part of North London with leafy roads and literary associations: George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Louis...
Read moreSharks, Otters and Fast Cars
Some books arrive out of the blue and virtually save one’s life, and Douglas Botting’s biography of Gavin Maxwell was one such book for me. I was lying in my hospital bed after an unscheduled...
Read moreSpecial Deliveries
My favourite Russian writer-doctor is not Anton Chekhov but Mikhail Bulgakov, who describes with aching clarity the slow and at times humiliating road to acquiring what London taxi-drivers call...
Read moreDistant Harmonies
Recently I was given a copy of The Music at Long Verney: Twenty Stories by Sylvia Townsend Warner. It was a revelation. Years ago, when I was a struggling art student, I read and loved her novels,...
Read moreSeeds of Friendship
Garden-writing is always either grimly concerned with the nuts and bolts of gardening’s practicalities or with its latest and flashiest fashions. The first kind is written by mere doers, the second...
Read moreMining Conrad
I once met a girl who was writing a thesis on Conrad. Her opinion of Nostromo was nothing if not passionate. ‘It’s like Conrad means to bore you to death,’ she recommended. ‘You must read...
Read moreTrouble at Mill
As well as being a rattling good read, Sabine Baring-Gould’s bloodstained historical romance Cheap Jack Zita is full of coincidences that make me feel rather possessive about it. It’s set in Ely...
Read moreLandscape and the Heart
‘Her whole life was spent riding at breakneck speed towards the wilder shores of love.’ Lesley Blanch’s memorable description of Jane Digby el Mezrab supplied the title of her first book and...
Read moreHolding the Pass to Paradise
Published in 1981, Among the Believers is the account of a journey through Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia in 1979, shortly after the Iranian revolution. Its subject, the Muslim fundamentalist...
Read moreImam with a Mission
Rifa‘a al-Tahtawi has the strange distinction of being the only nineteenth-century Egyptian writer with his very own website. I first heard about him in a lecture by the French journalist and...
Read moreLeap of Imagination
No book has exposed my own double standard to me more clearly than Dancer by Colum McCann. A fictional portrait of Rudolf Nureyev, told from many angles in many different voices, it opens with one of...
Read moreThe Chinese Book II
In Issue 1, I described the tradition in Chinese books of placing an illustration above a solid block of text on each page, a tradition that I set out to revive in my Chinese cookery manual.
Read moreWell-salted
It is laconic and simple, non-romantic in that Slocum refuses to be a lone hero struggling against the terrifying sea. Rather, he is at home in the ocean wilderness, insisting that ‘the wonderful...
Read moreFalse Bottoms
Once met, I rarely dislike a person. But the idea of a person often fills me with dislike and even abhorrence. So it was with Wyndham Lewis. I never met him but I might easily have done so, since I...
Read moreNot So Much a Business . . .
At the top of some concrete stairs, in a slightly run-down area of London near Sadler’s Wells, is a room with a magic carpet, otherwise known as Eland Books. Open an Eland book and you are...
Read moreBelated Reparation
Rereading the books of one’s youth is always a hazardous business, since a magic once lost can never be regained, so I contemplated a fresh assault on A Square of Sky with pleasure tinged with...
Read moreRevelling with Ruskin
John Ruskin’s Praeterita is one of the most exhilarating books I know, and I often go back to it. For most of his life the great art-critic-cum-sage was writing books to educate people. Once, when...
Read moreThe Salesman Only Rings Once
I hunted for his books as well as for the miscellanies and magazines that featured his work. Though his entertaining, much-quoted Memoirs of the Forties soon reappeared in paperback, the rest of his...
Read moreMarriage Lines
It is 8 a.m. on a September Sunday in New Delhi. The garden below is still fresh and green before the heat of the day, and pigeons bill and coo on the air-conditioning unit outside the bedroom...
Read moreIndexing on the Mekong
I guess (but I don’t know, since it’s not often a hot topic of conversation) that every amateur indexer has his or her own way of working. Since our joint IT expertise would shame most...
Read moreDaughter in Residence
It seems amazing that Ann Schlee’s work is not known to everyone, because she has always had her following and is still writing, but her four big novels written between the 1970s and 1996 are now...
Read more
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