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: Victoria Glendinning hunts a biographer • Lawrence Sail hears healing laughter • Sarah Lawson revisits Gone with the Wind • Rohan Candappa discovers a comic genius • Annabel Walker tastes the life of a peregrine • Patrick Welland enters the world of a Roman Emperor • Laura Freeman takes love lessons • John Keay witnesses a Javanese tragedy • Jane Ridley meets Edward VIII • Jeremy Lewis marches with Marlborough • Daisy Hay reads a novel of society, and much more besides . . .
Frankly, My Dear • SARAH LAWSON on Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
Hunt the Biographer • VICTORIA GLENDINNING on Michael Holroyd, Basil Street Blues
And So to Bed • ROHAN CANDAPPA on the comic strips of Winsor McCay
A Javanese Tragedy • JOHN KEAY on Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Buru Quartet
Riding the Wind • ANNABEL WALKER on J. A. Baker, The Peregrine
Last of the Pagans • PATRICK WELLAND on Gore Vidal, Julian
Work Experience • ANNE BOSTON on Mary Breasted, I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This
Marching with Marlborough • JEREMY LEWIS on Ronald Welch, Captain of Dragoons
Healing Laughter • LAWRENCE SAIL on P. J. Kavanagh, The Perfect Stranger
Falling in Love Again . . . • LAURA FREEMAN on Joan Wyndham, Love Lessons
A Glimpse of the Moon • WILLIAM PALMER on Jack Mapanje, And Crocodiles Are Hungry at Night
The Black Mask • DEREK PARKER on Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon
Prince Not-So-Charming • JANE RIDLEY on Frances Donaldson, Edward VIII
The Call of the Sea • GALEN O’HANLON on Neil M. Gunn, The Silver Darlings
A Dizzy Romance • DAISY HAY on Benjamin Disraeli, Endymion
The Battleship Salesman • CHARLES ELLIOTT on Hugh Trevor-Roper, Hermit of Peking
Fishcakes! • ANTHONY WELLS on Robert Graves, Lars Porsena or the Future of Swearing
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.
- Lawson, Sarah
- Toer, Pramoedya Ananta
- Holroyd, Michael
- Trevor-Roper, Hugh
- Vidal, Gore
- Walker, Annabel
- Welch, Ronald
- Welland, Patrick
- Wells, Anthony
- Kavanagh, P. J.
- Keay, John
- Wyndham, Joan
- Lewis, Jeremy
- Pirkis, Gail & Wood, Hazel
- Baker, J. A.
- Boston, Anne
- Breasted, Mary
- Candappa, Rohan
- Disraeli, Benjamin
- Donaldson, Frances
- Elliott, Charles
- Freeman, Laura
- Gifford, Andrew
- Glendinning, Victoria
- Graves, Robert
- Gunn, Neil M.
- Hammett, Dashiell
- McCay, Winsor
- Hay, Daisy
- Mapanje, Jack
- Mitchell, Margaret
- O’Hanlon, Galen
- Palmer, William
- Parker, Derek
- Ridley, Jane
- Sail, Lawrence
Slightly Foxed Issue 45: From the Editors
Intimations of spring at last! The days are lengthening, watery spring sunlight is filtering through the bare trees in the square, there’s a jug of daffodils on the windowsill, and the tatty old...
Read moreFrankly, My Dear
Mention Gone with the Wind and everyone thinks of Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh. It is Gable, in the role of Rhett Butler, who utters the immortal ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn’ when a...
Read moreHunt the Biographer
Michael Holroyd is the most distinguished biographer of his generation, chiefly on the strength of three monumental works – Lytton Strachey, Augustus John and Bernard Shaw, published between 1967...
Read moreThe Call of the Sea
It’s a wonderful thing when a book so fires the imagination that it becomes more real than the world around you, when the mind is totally absorbed, the page dissolves, and you begin to exist...
Read moreAnd So to Bed
On this particular day what caught my eye was a large-format hardback entitled The Complete Little Nemo in Slumberland, Volume 1: 1905–1907. I picked it up, opened the cover, and fell into a...
Read moreA Javanese Tragedy
I did, though, on someone’s recommendation, pick up an English translation of This Earth of Mankind (1980). The first volume in the Buru Quartet, it forms a necessary introduction to those that...
Read moreRiding the Wind
Living in buzzard country, I should have been looking for a book that would fill the many gaps in my knowledge of these avian next-door neighbours. In fact, I was simply searching for the best...
Read moreLast of the Pagans
Vidal explores this confrontation between old and new in a fictive autobiography drawing on three surviving volumes of Julian’s letters and essays, and contemporary recollections. In doing so, he...
Read moreWork Experience
The speaker – and wide-eyed narrator of I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This – is Sarah Makepeace, ex-college girl from Four Corners, Massachusetts, newly arrived in Greenwich Village and keen to...
Read moreMarching with Marlborough
Published in 1956, Captain of Dragoons is set in the reign of Queen Anne, during the early years of the War of the Spanish Succession, and the relevant member of the family is Charles Carey, ‘a...
Read moreFalling in Love Again . . .
Joan Wyndham was not about to let such a disagreeable thing as a world war get in the way of having a jolly time. It is not that she didn’t take the war seriously – after art school she...
Read moreA Glimpse of the Moon
Then, last year, I heard an interview with Jack on the BBC, talking about his memoir of life as a political prisoner in Malawi from 1987 to 1991. Its title, And Crocodiles Are Hungry at Night, refers...
Read moreThe Black Mask
The Thin Man was Hammett’s last book, and rather different from his others – it’s both thriller and sly sexual farce, the dialogue full of the slick one-liners which instantly became the...
Read morePrince Not-So-Charming
Because I write about monarchs, people have sometimes asked me whether I’ve read Frances Donaldson’s Edward VIII. ‘Not my period,’ I would stupidly reply, but the historian’s...
Read moreA Dizzy Romance
Endymion tells the story of Endymion and Myra Ferrars, a pair of improbably beautiful and good-natured twins, who are forced to make their own way in the world when their father loses his power and...
Read moreA Battleship Salesman
Hugh Trevor-Roper was Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford when in 1973 he received a letter from a Swiss doctor named Reinhard Hoeppli. Hoeppli had a strange request. He was in possession of...
Read moreFishcakes!
The future of swearing, what a wonderful subject. I looked forward to learning more: since the book was blessedly short, at 94 pages, 22 lines a page and only 6 words a line, finishing it wouldn’t...
Read more
Loved reading the article by Sarah Lawson of Margaret Mitchell’s book, Gone with the Wind. Sarah is a brilliant writer and gives the reader excitement as she reviews an old masterfully written book with its twists and turns and emotionally charged issues of lives being changed and women learning to survive.