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: Dervla Murphy travels to the Cape • Charles Elliott hails a woman warrior • Justin Marozzi visits Naples with Norman Lewis • Andrew Merrills finds himself betwixt woods and water • Paul Atterbury meets Inspector Appleby • Ysenda Maxtone Graham gets caught in the rye • Trevor Fishlock sings along at a holiday camp concert . . .
A Great Adventure • ANDREW MERRILLS on Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts; Between the Woods and the Water
Immemorial Rhythm • GORDON BOWKER on Richard Hillyer, Country Boy
Holden Revisited • YSENDA MAXTONE GRAHAM on J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
The Rise of Appleby • PAUL ATTERBURY on Michael Innes, The Appleby books
Mastering the Mutiny • PATRICK MERCER on John Masters, Nightrunners of Bengal
A Poem Turned into a Sword • CHARLES ELLIOTT on Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts
Championing the Underdog • JUSTIN MAROZZI on Norman Lewis, Naples ’44
A Bath with a View • CAROLINE CHAPMAN on Sybille Bedford, A Legacy
Feverish Haste • BENJAMIN WHITROW on the works of Denton Welch
An Eye for Absurdity • ANTHONY GARDNER on Michael Frayn, The Russian Interpreter
Rolling down to Rio • TREVOR FISHLOCK on Peter Dawson, Fifty Years of Song
Cape-bound • DERVLA MURPHY on Lady Duff Gordon, Letters from the Cape
Black Dogs and Stone Pianos • ANTHONY LONGDEN on the works of Ella Pontefract and Marie Hartley
A Lost Generation • TONY ROBERTS on Ernest Hemingway, The Sun also Rises
Persia on Exmoor • CYNTHIA CLINCH on Katharine Hull and Pamela Whitlock, The Far-Distant Oxus
Certainly not Cricket • JEREMY LEWIS on Christie Lawrence, Irregular Adventure
Hawking the Owls • TESSA WEST on Self-publishing
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.
- Pirkis, Gail & Wood, Hazel
- Hull, Katharine & Whitlock, Pamela
- Innes, Michael
- Welch, Denton
- West, Tessa
- Whitlock, Pamela & Hull, Katharine
- Whitrow, Benjamin
- Kingston, Maxine Hong
- Lawrence, Christie
- Lewis, Jeremy
- Lewis, Norman
- Self-publishing
- Sutton, Emily
- Cooper, Artemis
- Hartley, Marie
- Atterbury, Paul
- Bedford, Sybille
- Bowker, Gordon
- Chapman, Caroline
- Clinch, Cynthia
- Dawson, Peter
- Elliott, Charles
- Fermor, Patrick Leigh
- Fishlock, Trevor
- Frayn, Michael
- Gardner, Anthony
- Gordon, Lady Duff
- Graham, Ysenda Maxtone
- Longden, Anthony
- Hartley, Marie & Pontefract, Ella
- Hemingway, Ernest
- Masters, John
- Mercer, Patrick
- Merrills, Andy
- Murphy, Dervla
- Hillyer, Richard
- Pontefract, Ella & Hartley, Marie
- Roberts, Tony
- Salinger, J. D.
Slightly Foxed Issue 38: From the Editors
Well, summer’s here – at last. There are still plenty of people about in Hoxton Square, but it won’t be long before the city starts to empty out and that particular summer quiet descends which,...
Read moreDaisies
These cheerful daisies adorned the contents page of Slightly Foxed Issue 38, Summer 2013. Ian Stephens was born in North Buckinghamshire in 1940. He studied illustration and lettering at Northampton...
Read moreCountry Boy
The coloured words flashed out and entranced my fancy. They drew pictures in the mind. Words became magical, incantations, abracadabra which called up spirits. My dormant imagination opened like a...
Read moreImmemorial Rhythm
Few have recalled that now distant rural way of life with such riveting honesty as Richard Hillyer in his memoir Country Boy. Richard Hillyer was the pseudonym used by Charles James Stranks, the son...
Read moreHolden Revisited
Two photographs exist of me reading The Catcher in the Rye. One was taken thirty years ago by my father, on the top bunk bed in a sleeper train bound for Edinburgh. I was 19. The book was the orange...
Read moreThe Rise of Appleby
At various stages in my life I have succumbed to the lure of crime fiction, and I have always been a habitué of second-hand bookshops. That was how I came across Michael Innes in the late 1970s,...
Read moreMastering the Mutiny
When John Masters’ Nightrunners of Bengal was first published in 1951, John Raymond in the Sunday Times described it as ‘the best historical novel about the Indian Mutiny that I have ever...
Read moreA Poem Turned into a Sword
The Woman Warrior was my book. I say this not to avoid accusations of parti pris – after all, everybody who writes about a book for Slightly Foxed can by definition be accused of that – but...
Read moreChampioning the Underdog
From Herodotus’ and Thucydides’ time the war book has been with us as an ever-present literary companion to the massacres on the battlefield. I took Norman Lewis’s Naples ’44 to Iraq with me...
Read moreA Bath with a View
I once met Sybille Bedford. ‘Met’ is perhaps the wrong word; I pounced on her at a crowded Time-Life party and began raving about her novel A Legacy which I had just read. She looked at me...
Read moreFeverish Haste
In 2005 an excellent article by Lucy Lethbridge about Denton Welch appeared in Slightly Foxed. So why another? Well, he is one of those writers who attract a small but passionate band of devotees....
Read moreAn Eye for Absurdity
Village fêtes are dangerous places to buy books. The conviction that somewhere among the ancient almanacs and dog-eared Jilly Coopers lurks an underpriced treasure is so strong that I find it hard...
Read moreRolling down to Rio
Between the ages of 7 and 11 I often saw my father take the stage in a packed and smoky concert hall. It was a once-a-week performance. Sometimes I watched from the wings as he took command of the...
Read moreBlack Dogs and Stone Pianos
Despite the solidity of its dry stone walls and its rugged beauty, the landscape of the Yorkshire Dales is fragile. By the 1920s, more vulnerable still was the way of life that had continued there...
Read moreA Lost Generation
Many years ago my wife and I were confined by the police to our hot hotel in Rhodes for an evening, a fate we shared with other tourists as a result of anticipated demonstrations against the...
Read morePersia on Exmoor
The photograph in question fell out of a recently rediscovered book, The Far-Distant Oxus, in which horses – or rather ponies – play the leading role. The date of publication is 1937, the very...
Read moreCertainly not Cricket
Military men write better prose than most – by the nature of their work they eschew ambiguity and long-windedness in favour of plain-speaking – and Christie Lawrence was no exception to the rule....
Read moreHawking the Owls
Open any magazine whose readers include novice or would-be writers – from Writers’ News to the London Review of Books to Mslexia – and it’s clear that there must be an increasing number of...
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