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Slightly Foxed Issue 44
  • ISBN: 9781906562731
  • Pages: 96
  • Dimensions: 210 x 148mm
  • Illustrations: B/W
  • Publication date: 1 December 2014
  • Producer: Smith Settle
  • Cover artist: Mary Sumner, ‘Sheep in Frost’
  • ISSN: 1742-5794
Made in Britain

Slightly Foxed Issue 44

‘My Grandfather and Mr Standfast’

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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

Simon Barnes finds paradise in My Family and Other AnimalsYsenda Maxtone Graham goes back to school with Angela Brazil • Ranjit Bolt takes Betjeman to Hampstead Heath • Linda Leatherbarrow breakfasts at Tiffany’s • Richard Platt discovers that there are only seven basic plots • Ursula Buchan revisits her grandfather’s Mr Standfast • Anthony Wells consults his Encyclopaedia Britannica • Grant McIntyre puts to sea again with Patrick O’Brian • Belinda Hollyer falls for a mouse called Stuart Little • Gus Alexander tracks down the overweight detective Nero Wolfe, and much more besides . . .


My Grandfather and Mr Standfast • URSULA BUCHAN

John Buchan, Mr Standfast

Paradise Regained • SIMON BARNES

Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals

Aunt Freda Opens a Door • ANTHONY WELLS

The Encyclopaedia Britannica

Educating Ulyth • YSENDA MAXTONE GRAHAM

The Girls’ School Stories of Angela Brazil

The Importance of Being Decent • MATTHEW ADAMS

E. M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy

Social Climbing is Risky • ALEXANDER LUCIE-SMITH

On L. P. Hartley’s Eustace and Hilda Trilogy

The Plots Thicken • RICHARD PLATT

Christopher Booker, The Seven Basic Plots

O’Brian’s World • GRANT MCINTYRE

Patrick O’Brian, The Aubrey/Maturin novels

A Salute to Betjeman • RANJIT BOLT

John Betjeman, Collected Poems

Pastures of the Sky • LINDA LEATHERBARROW

Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Far from a Fling • ROGER HUDSON

Elizabeth Grant, Memoirs of a Highland Lady

Snow in the Quad • DAVID WEMYSS

C. P. Snow, The Strangers and Brothers series

The Mouse that Roared • BELINDA HOLLYER

E. B. White, Stuart Little

Inside the Inside Man • MATT HUBER

John Gunther, The Inside books

An Elevated Lifestyle • GUS ALEXANDER

Rex Stout, Fer-de-Lance

All in the Mind? • SARAH CROWDEN

On Smut


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.



Slightly Foxed Issue 44: From the Editors

Another year almost gone. The lights are going on early now in Hoxton Square, and on misty evenings there’s a sense of a ghostly earlier London hovering just out of reach, while only a few hundred...

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‘Made me laugh out loud . . .’

‘I’m mad about Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s piece in the new issue. Made me laugh out loud. I was a Malory Towers reader and never discovered Angela Brazil. I may have to seek her out for something...

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‘Keep up the good work . . .’ A. Hill, West Sussex

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O’Brian’s World

O’Brian’s mastery of language is most wonderful of all. He manages to capture that mixture of toughness and grace which, for me at least, makes formal eighteenth-century English so attractive....

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Paradise Regained

Every paradise is lost. That’s kind of the point. Loss is the diagnostic feature of every paradise ever lived or imagined. But for five miraculous years and 120,000 miraculous words Gerald...

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My Grandfather and Mr Standfast

In the hope that there might be other, more nuanced narratives, I have set myself the goal of reading widely about the war: recent histories, of course, but also those books written during it or soon...

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Aunt Freda Opens a Door

One day in the late 1980s I had a call from my Aunt Freda. It came completely out of the blue, for although Freda had been my favourite godmother throughout my childhood, I had hardly exchanged a...

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Educating Ulyth

I hardly need tell you that ‘Brazil’ is supposed to be pronounced ‘Brazzle’, although I still find it hard not to pronounce it as it looks. Unmarried, childless, but busy and fulfilled,...

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The Importance of Being Decent

In January 1939, as Europe was convulsing to the rhythms of what George Orwell would call ‘the tom-tom beat of a latter-day tribalism’, W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and E. M. Forster were...

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Social Climbing is Risky

The Eustace and Hilda trilogy is a comedy of manners, an illustration of how the middle classes are lost in the upper-class world of great houses and Venetian palazzi, and puzzled by men called Dick...

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The Plots Thicken

Booker has that peculiar genius which connects commonplaces that we would never have connected for ourselves, makes observations that, only when once made, are self-evident, and asks questions we...

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A Salute to Betjeman

On Hampstead Heath a leisured stroll To calm the mind and soothe the soul – North London’s take on Flatford Mill – The air is thick with heat, and still, The sunshine gilds the two...

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Pastures of the Sky

I was 16 when I first read Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but because this is a novella that begins with an ending, full of uncertainties and possibilities, I soon realized that this was a complex...

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Far From a Fling

The shelves of John Murray seemed filled with books by its strong-minded, often indomitable women writers when I went to work there in 1972: Jane Austen, Queen Victoria, travellers like Isabella...

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Snow in the Quad

I began reading C. P. Snow’s ‘Strangers and Brothers’ series of novels in 1980. I had just started my first serious job in local government and, although I didn’t know it, I was about to live...

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The Mouse that Roared

When I was 9 and at primary school in New Zealand, my class teacher was a poet called Kendrick Smithyman. He was a rather bad-tempered curmudgeon but he had an overwhelming advantage over any other...

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Inside the Inside Man

Inside Europe, Inside USA, Inside Russia . . . if journalism is the first draft of history, John Gunther’s journalistic documentary works are indisputably dated – his last, Inside Australia, had...

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An Elevated Lifestyle

The amazing thing about Nero Wolfe, hero of Rex Stout’s Fer-de-Lance, was that he lived in a house with its own elevator. I was 14 when I first read the book. I was spending the school holidays...

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All in the Mind?

I have long wanted to offer an update on the latest additions to the Crowden Archive. Some subscribers may recall the first piece on the subject, ‘Something for the Weekend’ in Slightly Foxed No....

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