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 praises Pratchett • Andrew Nixon admires Flashman • Oliver Pritchett borrows some books • Gee Williams goes down to the sea again • Ashley Harrold digs out his Brewer • Ursula Buchan visits a garden in spring • Ranjit Bolt versifies on Larkin • Colin Dunne gets a sex education • Grant McIntyre turns revolutionary . . .
A World of Shining Beauty • GEE WILLIAMS
John Masefield, Grace before Ploughing
All Creatures Great and Small • HAZEL WOOD
Suzanne St Albans, Mango and Mimosa
In Praise of Pratchett • AMANDA THEUNISSEN
Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
Teaching Life • GRANT MCINTYRE
On the works of Richard Cobb
How Did He Do It? • RANJIT BOLT
On the works of Philip Larkin
Every Green Thing • JOHN GRAY
On the works of John Cowper Powys
Much More than a Perfect Gent • URSULA BUCHAN
E. A. Bowles, My Garden in Spring
Flashy but Irresistible • ANDREW NIXON
George MacDonald Fraser, the Flashman books
The Making of Flashman • PATRICK MERCER
George MacDonald Fraser, Quartered Safe Out Here
A Tourist in Search of Home • DAVID BARNES
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Unconsoled
Neither a Borrower . . . ? • OLIVER PRITCHETT
On the etiquette of book borrowing
Dreamwork • KATHRYN PEAK
Catherine Storr, Marianne Dreams
A Plug for Dr Brewer • A. F. HARROLD
Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
Dream of Old England • ANDREW SINCLAIR
Rudyard Kipling, Puck of Pook’s Hill
Lytton’s Characteristic Specimen • ARIANE BANKES
Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians
Chips Triumphant • JOHN HAMMOND
James Hilton, Good-bye Mr Chips
All They Had Was Hank • COLIN DUNNE
On the novels of Hank Janson
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.
- Larkin, Philip
- Book borrowing, the etiquette of
- Sinclair, Andrew
- Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
- Storr, Catherine
- Pirkis, Gail & Wood, Hazel
- Strachey, Lytton
- Lovell, Andy
- Theunissen, Amanda
- Ishiguro, Kazuo
- Janson, Hank
- Wood, Hazel
- Williams, Gee
- Kipling, Rudyard
- Barnes, David
- Bankes, Ariane
- Bolt, Ranjit
- Bowles, E. A.
- Buchan, John
- Cobb, Richard
- Dunne, Colin
- Fraser, George MacDonald
- Gray, John
- Hammond, John
- McIntyre, Grant
- Harrold, A. F.
- Masefield, John
- Mercer, Patrick
- Hilton, James
- Nixon, Andrew
- Peak, Kathryn
- Powys, John Cowper
- Pratchett, Terry
- Pritchett, Oliver
- St Albans, Suzanne
Slightly Foxed Issue 33: From the Editors
Now the year has turned and spring bulbs are bravely poking up in Clerkenwell window-boxes, we’re looking forward hopefully, as well as looking back thoughtfully over the events of the past year,...
Read moreDucks and Daffodils
Today’s woodcut first appeared on the contents page of Slightly Foxed Issue 33 in Spring 2012. Rosalind Bliss is a landscape artist based in the UK. She learned the rudiments of wood engraving from...
Read moreNeither a Borrower . . . ?
Every year the registrar of Public Lending Right issues a report on the authors whose books have been most often borrowed from libraries. You can be sure these days that Danielle Steel, Josephine Cox...
Read moreHow Did He Do It?
I came to them, the second time, quite late, It was the day The letters, full of snobbery and race hate That caused the chattering classes such dismay Came out, and Terry Eagleton had...
Read moreA World of Shining Beauty
My small Welsh primary school lay at the end of Boundary Lane, on the Flintshire-Cheshire border. It was a good 20 miles from any beach. Nevertheless, the first thing I remember having to learn was...
Read moreAll Creatures Great and Small
In the early days of Slightly Foxed, in our very first issue in fact, I wrote about a book that had once come my way in the course of my work as a publisher’s editor – a book that had entranced...
Read moreIn Praise of Pratchett
Death turns up a lot in Terry Pratchett’s books. He’s one of his most popular characters, a seven-foot-high skeleton with burning blue eyes who speaks in CAPITALS. He is as terrifying as one...
Read moreTeaching Life
Richard Cobb was a history don at Balliol, eccentric in a college where oddness is almost routine. He was small and thin, not very prepossessing. Jeremy Lewis, his editor at Chatto & Windus,...
Read moreEvery Green Thing
It is hard to know what has made me a lifelong reader of John Cowper Powys, but perhaps the fact that he was one of three very different brothers who shared a common impulse may be part of the...
Read moreMuch More than a Perfect Gent
I cannot think of many garden writers from a century ago in whose company I would have felt entirely comfortable. William Robinson would have ignored me, Gertrude Jekyll seen through me, and Reginald...
Read moreFlashy but Irresistible
‘Flashman is back,’ declared the Labour leader Ed Miliband at Prime Minister’s Questions on 11 May 2011. He was referring to David Cameron and he presumably meant to imply that the Tory was a...
Read moreThe Making of Flashman
I was brought up on a diet of George MacDonald Fraser’s anti-hero Flashman as he roistered and rogered his way around the Empire, and I reread many of the books while serving in Northern Ireland....
Read moreDreamwork
When my sister was 10 she bought a rather battered copy of a book called Marianne Dreams at our school summer fair. A few years later, when she decided it was too young for her, she handed it on to...
Read moreA Plug for Dr Brewer
Dr Brewer’s Dictionary (1870) is a uniquely curious lucky dip of a book – part anthology of proverbs, part almanac, part Classical dictionary, part trivia. The man in the street who hadn’t the...
Read moreDream of Old England
A picture in our little house and a book excited me. There was a coloured print of Sir Walter Raleigh in Elizabethan hose and doublet, sword and feathered hat, explaining his faraway adventures to...
Read moreLytton’s Characteristic Specimen
Rereading ‘The End of General Gordon’, the fourth of Lytton Strachey’s portraits in Eminent Victorians (1918), is an awful reminder of our failure to learn from history. Gordon’s and...
Read moreChips Triumphant
On my bookshelves are several well-thumbed copies of Good-bye Mr Chips. One is a first edition with a delightful jacket illustration by Bip Pares of Mr Chips asleep in an armchair. Another is a film...
Read moreAll They Had Was Hank
Try it yourself. Assemble a handful of chaps of pensionable age – because these will be men whose voices were wavering between treble and tenor in the 1950s – and ask them if they remember the...
Read more
