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: Richard Mabey finds a cellmate • Anne Boston falls for Carrington • Anthony Gardner salutes a remarkable soldier • Jane Ridley curtseys to a queen • David Gilmour visits a francophile’s England • Daisy Hay meets a Mitford • Patrick Welland raises a glass to Flann O’Brien • Galen O’Hanlon paddles with ducks . . .
Cellmates • RICHARD MABEY on Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher
The Strength of the Gentle • ANTHONY GARDNER on John Hackett, I Was a Stranger
Git a Hoss! • DAVID RAIN on Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons
Never a Belonger • DAVID GILMOUR on the works of Richard Cobb
A Reluctant Hero • AMANDA THEUNISSEN on Ronald Welch, Captain of Foot
Marching with the Trottas • ARIANE BANKES on Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March
The Purple Moth • JANE RIDLEY on James Pope-Hennessy, Queen Mary
Through the Wardrobe • LOMAX ALLWOOD on the illustrations of Pauline Diana Baynes
A Quare One • PATRICK WELLAND on the novels of Flann O’Brien
Taking a Gander • GALEN O’HANLON on Dillon Ripley, A Paddling of Ducks
The War of Aircraftwoman 2146391 • DON WATSON on Mary Lee Settle, All the Brave Promises
Well Earthed • ANTHONY LONGDEN on S. L. Bensusan, Village Idylls; A Marshland Omnibus
Honourable Rebel • DAISY HAY on Jessica Mitford, Hons and Rebels
A Certain Idea of France • HENRY JEFFREYS on Allan Massie, A Question of Loyalties
Catlike Carrington • ANNE BOSTON on The Art of Dora Carrington
What Became of Waring • MICHAEL BARBER on Anthony Powell, What’s Become of Waring
A Dickens of a Project • LAURA FREEMAN on the works of Charles Dickens
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.
- Allwood, Lomax
- Sussman, Peter Y.
- Tarkington, Booth
- Theunissen, Amanda
- Thomas, Lewis
- Watson, Don
- Welland, Patrick
- Jeffreys, Henry
- Lewis, J. Weston
- Tolkien, J. R. R.
- Children’s stories
- Pirkis, Gail & Wood, Hazel
- Carrington, Dora
- Barber, Michael
- Bankes, Ariane
- Baynes, Pauline
- Bensusan, S. L.
- Boston, Anne
- Dickens, Charles
- Freeman, Laura
- Gardner, Anthony
- Garnett, David
- Gilmour, David
- Longden, Anthony
- Mabey, Richard
- Hay, Daisy
- Haycock, David Boyd
- Massie, Allan
- Mitford, Jessica
- Hill, Jane
- O’Brien, Flann
- O’Hanlon, Galen
- Pope-Hennessy, James
- Rain, David
- Ridley, Jane
- Ripley, Dillon
- Roth, Joseph
- Settle, Mary Lee
Slightly Foxed Issue 41: From the Editors
As we mentioned in the last issue, we’re marking our tenth anniversary this year in various ways, but perhaps most importantly with the publication of a very unusual little book. It’s called...
Read moreSnake’s head fritillary / fritillaria meleagris
It seems that spring has finally sprung and the bluebells and crocuses are out in full bloom. We long to see some snake’s head fritillary out in Hoxton Square, but alas will have to make do with...
Read moreCellmates
As I remember it, Vole was already up and running when Lewis Thomas arose in our midst like some ecological genie, a combination of gentle evangelist and stand-up comedian. It was 1977, and Richard...
Read moreThe Strength of the Gentle
Among Britain’s defeats in the Second World War, the Battle of Arnhem comes second only to Dunkirk in the popular imagination. The parachute troops’ hopeless bid for control of the Rhine crossing...
Read moreGit a Hoss!
Radio stations in my youth were always running phone-ins to find the greatest pop songs of all time – that is, of the last few decades. The top song, as I recall, was always the same: ‘Stairway...
Read moreNever a Belonger
Richard Cobb in England seems, if not quite an oxymoron, at least a bizarre fortuity, an accident of birth, like El Greco in Crete or Livingstone in Lanarkshire. For was he not one of the most...
Read moreA Reluctant Hero
What would you do if you were a soldier, the last in a long line of fighting ancestors who had all distinguished themselves in battle, but you really hated going to war and wanted to give it all up...
Read moreMarching with the Trottas
Some novels creep up quietly on you from behind, while others grasp you firmly by the collar and sweep you briskly into their firmament, barely giving you time to catch your breath. The Radetzky...
Read moreThrough the Wardrobe
The Chronicles of Narnia are now re-entering children’s consciousness because of the current series of films, and it often takes some time to convince them that the books came first. For me,...
Read moreA Quare One
I sensed him looking at me as I sat in the tobacco fug of the Palace Bar in Dublin’s Fleet Street back in the ’60s engrossed in Joyce’s Dubliners. His scrutiny from the adjacent bar stool was...
Read moreTaking a Gander
I was determined to leave behind the pretensions of the English Lit. student in me, the one who might casually let Paradise Lost or The Prelude or even the later works of St Augustine drop from his...
Read moreThe War of Aircraftwoman 2146391
Mary Lee Settle is best known as the author of a quintet of novels set in her native West Virginia. But her memoir All the Brave Promises: The Memories of Aircraftwoman Second Class 2146391,...
Read moreWell Earthed
I made my first acquaintance with David Grayson in a dank corner of a bookshop basement. The bare light bulb just overhead had gone out, probably months before, leaving the corner in deep shadow....
Read moreA Certain Idea of France
In 2011 a French popular novelist called Alexandre Jardine was vilified in both Le Figaro and Le Monde for writing that his grandfather was complicit in the crimes of the Vichy regime. Over seventy...
Read moreCatlike Carrington
On New Year’s Day 1917 Carrington noted in her diary that her portrait of Lytton Strachey was finished; knowing her achievement, she hugged it to herself. ‘I should like to go on always painting...
Read moreWhat Became of Waring
I can’t remember when I discovered Anthony Powell, but I do know that what caught my attention about his first novel, Afternoon Men (1931), was somebody’s description of it as ‘the party novel...
Read moreA Dickens of a Project
At midnight on New Year’s Eve 2012, as fireworks burst over Hyde Park, I was propped up in bed with a paperback feeling a terrific failure. The book was Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge. I was 459...
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