In this issue
John Walsh remembers his friend Beryl Bainbridge • Morag MacInnes rereads the haunting Orkney stories of Eric Linklater • Derek Parker recalls the world evoked by Arnold Bennett’s diaries • Melissa Harrison tucks Oliver Rackham’s History of the English Countryside into her backpack • Andrew Merrills journeys west with a monkey king • Victoria Neumark dips into a Walter de la Mare anthology • Dick Russell suggests that Churchill might have benefited from a reading of C. S. Forester’s novel The General • Frances Wood researches the explosive history of rhubarb • William Palmer is kidnapped • Cheryl Tipp listens to the memoirs of a birdman • Martin Sorrell takes pleasure in small things . . .
The Flight in the Heather • WILLIAM PALMER
Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped
Grandma’s Footsteps • OLIVER PRITCHETT
Harold Carlton, Marrying Out
A Living Landscape • MELISSA HARRISON
Oliver Rackham, The Illustrated History of the Countryside
He Did His Duty • DICK RUSSELL
C.S. Forester, The General
Marvellous Therapy • JOHN WALSH
On the novels of Beryl Bainbridge
Written on the Heart • VICTORIA NEUMARK
Walter de la Mare (ed.), Come Hither
Winning Their Spurs • CHRISTIAN TYLER
Ronald Welch, Bowman of Crécy; The Hawk
174517 • DAVID SPILLER
Primo Levi, If This Is a Man; The Truce
With an Ear to the Earth • CHERYL TIPP
Ludwig Koch, Memoirs of a Birdman
Small Is Beautiful • MARTIN SORRELL
Philippe Delerm, La Première gorgée de bière
Monkey Business • ANDREW MERRILLS
Wu Ch’êng-ên, Monkey
Sleuthing with the Colonel • MARK VALENTINE
Philip MacDonald, The Gethryn books
A Love Affair with Orkney • MORAG MACINNES
Eric Linklater, Sealskin Trousers
The Purveyor of Popular Fiction • DEREK PARKER
Norman Flower (ed.), The Journals of Arnold Bennett
On Man, the Human Heart and Human Life • C.J. DRIVER
On the novels of Stanley Middleton
Growing Up with Winston • JIM RING
Winston Churchill, My Early Life
Rhubarb! • FRANCES WOOD
On the history of Chinese rhubarb
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. More . . .
- Bainbridge, Beryl
- Carlton, Harold
- Churchill, Winston
- De la Mare, Walter
- Delerm, Philippe
- Driver, C. J.
- Flower, Norman
- Forester, C. S.
- Grimmond, Pam
- Harrison, Melissa
- Hassall, Joan
- Koch, Ludwig
- Levi, Primo
- Lindsley, Kathleen
- Linklater, Eric
- MacDonald, Philip
- MacInnes, Morag
- Merrills, Andy
- Middleton, Stanley
- Neumark, Victoria
- Palmer, William
- Pirkis, Gail & Wood, Hazel
- Pritchett, Oliver
- Rackham, Oliver
- Ring, Jim
- Russell, Dick
- Sorrell, Martin
- Spiller, David
- Stevenson, Robert Louis
- Tipp, Cheryl
- Tyler, Christian
- Valentine, Mark
- Walsh, John
- Welch, Ronald
- Wood, Frances
- Wu Ch’êng-ên
Lobster
We love wood engravings and in the printed quarterly we have an occasional series to introduce the work of some of our favourite engravers. We'll be sharing a woodcut from our archive on the website...
Read moreThe Purveyor of Popular Fiction
Virginia Woolf unkindly called Bennett ‘a tradesman’ – and up to a point one sees what she meant. He did not thrive on the rarefied air of Bloomsbury: he was Enoch Arnold Bennett, late of...
Read moreGrandma’s Footsteps
The first thing that strikes one about the Conway family is the noise. The air is filled with Father’s sudden roars of rage, the slaps he lands on his son Howard, and his two other children, the...
Read moreThe Flight in the Heather
I saw the set of books through the window of a second-hand furniture shop in Oxford a couple of years ago. Each with a dark-blue spine stamped with a gilt palm tree, they ran across the top of one of...
Read moreA Living Landscape
It began, I seem to remember, with a grown-out hedge: four huge ash trees bordering a Hampshire footpath, all with the same odd kink in their trunks. The pleasure of recognition, of being able to...
Read moreHe Did His Duty
I have read most of C. S. Forester’s books, but had never come across The General until I found a copy last year in a second-hand shop. It nestled next to a biography of Winston Churchill written...
Read moreMarvellous Therapy
I first met Beryl Bainbridge in 1982, when I went to interview her friend and editor Anna Haycraft for Books & Bookmen. I was later to discover that Beryl practically lived at the Haycrafts’ house...
Read moreWritten on the Heart
My mother used to read to us on the battered old couch. As the light faded, we would snuggle up and read along with her pointing finger. It was magic; it was spells; it was home. Her glasses slightly...
Read moreWinning Their Spurs
I never read Ronald Welch as a child – he was writing a bit too late for me – but his historical adventure stories have a very familiar ring. In Bowman of Crécy and The Hawk I recognized with...
Read more174517
Is a sequel ever as good as its original? Primo Levi’s autobiographical account of Auschwitz (If This Is a Man) is a celebrated book while its follow-up (The Truce) remains less well known. But...
Read moreWith an Ear to the Earth
Koch’s Memoirs of a Birdman opens in 1889 when, at the age of 8, he made the world’s first ever recording of an animal, and closes in 1953 when he fulfilled a lifelong ambition to visit Iceland...
Read moreMonkey Business
Television in the 1970s and 1980s was educational. Bergerac taught us that Jersey was a seething cauldron of crime; Grange Hill introduced a generation of children to sausages and heroin. And Monkey?...
Read moreSmall is Beautiful
Recently, ailing and housebound, I looked for succour in a book by a contemporary French novelist, one I remembered hugely enjoying when it first appeared. A good read has to be high on the list of...
Read moreSleuthing with the Colonel
This relative neglect is all the more surprising because MacDonald was much admired by his peers. He was awarded the Edgar Allan Poe prize twice. His early novel The Rasp (1924), which introduced his...
Read moreA Love Affair with Orkney
Eric Linklater was a bit of a force of nature. He was born in Wales, but wished he hadn’t been, so he conjured an Orkney childhood and let everyone assume he had been born there. His father was...
Read moreOn Man, the Human Heart and Human Life
One of my favourite novelists, now largely forgotten, is Stanley Middleton (1919–2009). He wrote 45 novels, the last published posthumously. I thought I had them all, but when reorganizing my...
Read moreGrowing Up with Winston
Born in 1874, the son of a Chancellor of the Exchequer contemporary with Gladstone and Disraeli, he made his name as a journalist covering the Boer War, became an MP at 26, President of the Board of...
Read moreAt Home with the Cazalets
‘All happy families resemble one another,’ said Tolstoy, rather sweepingly, ‘but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ The Anna Karenina principle has so long been taken for a...
Read moreComments & Reviews
Leave your review
