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: Tim Mackintosh-Smith meets Norman Douglas in Calabria • Laurence Scott recalls the unexpected humour of teaching poetry to adults • David Spiller champions Nevil Shute • Caroline Moore revels in Victorian sensationalism • Stephen Honey undergoes a poker player’s education • Oliver Pritchett examines the etiquette of book-signings • James Roose-Evans meets a Cockney bookseller • Catherine Merrick follows the discovery of the double helix • Ranjit Bolt admires Dickens’s mistress . . .
The Return of Grouse • LAURENCE SCOTT on Neil Astley (ed.), Staying Alive; Being Alive
Water Pistols at Fifty Paces • HAZEL WOOD on Ysenda Maxtone Graham, Mr Tibbits’s Catholic School
The Long Arm of Coincidence • CAROLINE MOORE on Wilkie Collins, Poor Miss Finch
From Convent to Kitchen Table • ALEXANDER LUCIE-SMITH on the novels of Alice Thomas Ellis
Honest Jim and the Double Helix • CATHERINE MERRICK on James Watson, The Double Helix; Brenda Maddox, Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA
A Winning Hand • STEPHEN HONEY on Herbert O. Yardley, The Education of a Poker Player
Another, Darker Continent • TIM MACKINTOSH-SMITH on Norman Douglas, Old Calabria
Vanishing Point • MARTIN SORRELL on Rupert Martin (ed.), Night Trick by O. Winston Link
Pearls and a Fur Jacket • FRANCES DONNELLY on Anne Scott-James, In the Mink
A Matter of Dedication • OLIVER PRITCHETT on the etiquette of book-signing
Sam Pepys from Walworth • JAMES ROOSE-EVANS on Fred Bason, Diaries
The King’s Spaniel • LINDA LEATHERBARROW on Rose Tremain, Restoration
Siberian Taiga • PATRICK EVANS on Vladimir Klavdievich Arseniev, Dersu the Trapper
The Real Thing • JEREMY LEWIS on R. S. Surtees, Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour
A Prisoner of Her Time • RANJIT BOLT on Claire Tomalin, The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens
Deliberately Engineered • DAVID SPILLER on the novels of Nevil Shute
Frogs, Books and Bears • SHEILA RHODES on bookselling and the joy of children’s literature
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.
- Leatherbarrow, Linda
- Shute, Nevil
- Sorrell, Martin
- Spiller, David
- Surtees, R. S.
- Ellis, Alice Thomas
- Tomalin, Claire
- Tremain, Rose
- Honey, Stephen
- Watson, James
- Wood, Hazel
- Yardley, Herbert O.
- Lewis, Jeremy
- Book signing, the etiquette of
- Pirkis, Gail & Wood, Hazel
- Field, Robert
- Bason, Fred
- Arseniev, V. K.
- Astley, Neil
- Bolt, Ranjit
- Collins, Wilkie
- Donnelly, Frances
- Douglas, Norman
- Evans, Patrick
- Graham, Ysenda Maxtone
- Lucie-Smith, Alexander
- Maddox, Brenda
- Martin, Rupert
- Merrick, Catherine
- Moore, Caroline
- Pancake, Breece D’J.
- Pritchett, Oliver
- Rhodes, Sheila
- Roose-Evans, James
- Scott, Laurence
- Scott-James, Anne
Slightly Foxed Issue 31: From the Editors
There’s an invigorating sharpness in the air now, that frosty tang that brings with it thoughts of country walks, winter fires, evenings with a good book, the possibilities of a new term. And with...
Read moreThe Return of Grouse
An upstairs room in a north London public library. I was teaching ‘Introduction to Contemporary Poetry’ to a class of twelve adults, and we’d been going for about twenty minutes. They were all...
Read moreWater Pistols at Fifty Paces
The year was 1934, and Richard (‘Dick’) Tibbits, it seems, had been approached by Father Talbot of the Brompton Oratory with the suggestion that there was need for a Catholic boys’ prep school...
Read moreThe Long Arm of Coincidence
Can you resist a Victorian novel featuring a blind heroine and identical twins, rivals for her love – one of whom turns dark blue in the course of the novel? If not, read no further, but rush off...
Read moreHonest Jim and the Double Helix
It isn’t every day that I eat pizza with a Nobel laureate. The experience was a fringe benefit of an undergraduate studentship at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a cluster of biological research...
Read moreA Winning Hand
Over twenty years ago, I started a regular weekly poker game with a group of friends who had all recently gravitated to London. We had been inspired to do this by Anthony Holden’s beguiling...
Read moreAnother, Darker Continent
‘I like these old travellers,’ wrote Norman Douglas, ‘not so much for what they actually say, as for their implicit outlook on life.’ The comment comes apropos his early eighteenth-century...
Read moreVanishing Point
Think of an Edward Hopper picture, Main Street, Anywheresville, USA, a warm summer’s evening. Geometric buildings, neat and desolate. Give them names: Northfork Drug; The Hub Men’s Clothing;...
Read morePearls and a Fur Jacket
Anne Scott-James was one of the ‘First Ladies’ of Fleet Street, though she preferred the title ‘one of the first career girls’. Her novel In the Mink, published in 1952, is a thinly disguised...
Read moreA Matter of Dedication
Before this book-signing craze gets completely out of hand, we must establish some rules. After all, what may be considered correct in Waterstone’s could be frowned upon in Hatchards and be beyond...
Read moreSam Pepys from Walworth
It was the second-hand book-dealer Malcolm Applin, whose catalogue I find always opens doors and windows, who first introduced me to the Cockney bookseller and writer Fred Bason. Fred had been...
Read moreThe King’s Spaniel
I have no idea on what my father based this and I’m sure he was genuinely trying to console, but for years afterwards I avoided novels that mixed politics and facts, particularly historical novels....
Read moreSiberian Taiga
The dog pricked up his ears, which was surprising because so far he hadn’t seemed all that bright. Vanya and I turned to look. At the edge of the clearing a man in a white woollen suit was just...
Read moreThe Real Thing
One of Rudyard Kipling’s stories, ‘My Son’s Wife’, features a high-minded young aesthete named Midmore, who spends his days pondering the improvement of society. Midmore inherits a country...
Read moreA Prisoner of Her Time
Why wasn’t Charles Dickens knighted, assuming he wasn’t offered the honour and declined it, as some authorities believe? Would it have been because he spilled so much ink lambasting the...
Read moreDeliberately Engineered
It is over fifty years since the death of Nevil Shute, who from 1940 to 1960 was probably the best-selling novelist in Britain. You could hardly not read Shute in those days. I devoured him...
Read moreFrogs, Books and Bears
‘Where is Patrick Spotter?’ The Japanese customer looked somewhat annoyed. She had been told that the staff of Heffers Children’s Bookshop in Cambridge were so knowledgeable that they could...
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