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
Jeremy Lewis gets lit up by Simon Gray’s Smoking Diaries • Lucy Lethbridge hears A Voice through a Cloud • Ranjit Bolt is moved to rhyme by Byron’s Don Juan • Adèle Geras takes a walk down Revolutionary Road • Juliet Gardiner tracks the extraordinary history of the tank • John de Falbe discovers the story of an exiled Russian princess • Ariane Bankes travels to York to meet a very unusual bookseller • Ursula Buchan digs in with Vita Sackville-West • Miles Hordern drops anchor off a remote Melanesian island • Sue Gee pays her respects to a tortoise called Archimedes, and much more besides . . .
A Hare’s Breadth • PATRICK EVANS
George Ewart Evans & David Thomson, The Leaping Hare
Smoke Signals • JEREMY LEWIS
Simon Gray, The Smoking Diaries
Tank Tracks • JULIET GARDINER
Patrick Wright, Tank: The Progress of a Monstrous War Machine
Cooking for Love • KATHARINE DAVIES
Romesh Gunesekera, Reef
Horn-rims and Baggy Chords • ARIANE BANKES
On Stone Trough Books
Drama in Suburbia • ADELE GERAS
Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road
Daughters of Time • ROGER HUDSON
Memoirs of the Comtesse de Boigne
Admirin’ Byron • RANJIT BOLT
Lord Byron, Don Juan
An Island Apart • MILES HORDERN
Raymond Firth, We the Tikopia
The View from Denestornya • RUTH PAVEY
Miklos Banffy, The Writing on the Wall: The Transylvanian Trilogy
A Perfect Nightmare • LUCY LETHBRIDGE
Denton Welch, A Voice through A Cloud
Made in Siberia • JOHN DE FALBE
Christine Sutherland, The Princess of Siberia
High Life • SEBASTIAN HORSLEY
Edward St Aubyn, The Patrick Melrose trilogy
A Word in Your Ear • JONATHAN JAMES-MOORE
On audiobooks
Posh but Down-to-Earth • URSULA BUCHAN
V. Sackville-West, In Your Garden; In Your Garden Again
Peacock’s Progress • J. W. M. THOMPSON
Thomas Love Peacock, Headlong Hall; Crotchet Castle
A Past Relived • SUE BRIDGWATER
Alison Uttley, The Country Child
The Book Hound
Slightly Foxed’s Book Hound runs to earth a selection of interesting fiction which may well have lost behind the piles of bestsellers.
The Tortoise and the Writer • SUE GEE
In memory of Archimedes
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.
- Thomson, David & Evans, George Ewart
- Stone Trough Books
- Hordern, Miles
- Audiobooks
- Horsley, Sebastian
- Griesemer, John
- Uttley, Alison
- Hinton, Nigel
- Hudson, Roger
- Keret, Etgar
- Welch, Denton
- Yamada, Taichi
- James-Moore, Jonathan
- Pirkis, Gail & Wood, Hazel
- Wright, Patrick
- The Book Hound
- Yates, Richard
- Sutherland, Christine
- Lethbridge, Lucy
- Thompson, J. W. M.
- Lewis, Jeremy
- Bankes, Ariane
- Banffy, Miklos
- Bolt, Ranjit
- Brett, Simon
- Bridgwater, Sue
- Buchan, Ursula
- Byron, Lord
- Davies, Katharine
- De Boigne, Madame
- De Falbe, John
- De la Tour du Pin, Madame
- Evans, Patrick
- Firth, Raymond
- Gardiner, Juliet
- Gee, Sue
- Geras, Adèle
- Gray, Simon
- Gunesekera, Romesh
- Peacock, Thomas Love
- Pavey, Ruth
- Rémusat, Madame de
- Sackville-West, Vita
- St Aubyn, Edward
- Scott, Linda
Slightly Foxed Issue 5: From the Editors
Slightly Foxed celebrates its first birthday this month, and we send special thanks and good wishes to our original subscribers who so sportingly took us on trust a year ago. We’re absolutely...
Read moreA Hare’s Breadth
Reading the opening chapter, I was immediately sucked into a magical world. The hare’s behaviour confounds science: it may move in a great drove like deer; it sucks milk from cows at pasture; it...
Read moreSmoke Signals
I am wretchedly ill-qualified to write about Simon Gray, since I am hopeless about going to the theatre and have never seen one of his plays. I plan to remedy matters as soon as I can, but in the...
Read moreTank Tracks
The tank is an emblem of state power, a behemoth that has transformed wars and threatened – and sometimes mown down – civilians. But it has also been seen as a ‘cubist slug’, has inspired a...
Read moreCooking for Love
Each time I read Reef – the story of a boy, Triton, growing up as a servant and cook in Sri Lanka in the late 1960s – I find something new. I think the way that The Tempest flits in and out of...
Read moreHorn-rims and Baggy Chords
In George Ramsden’s quiet secondhand bookshop, Stone Trough Books, in York, he normally has a publishing job on the go as well. Editing (letters of Siegfried Sassoon at the moment) and book-design...
Read moreDrama in Suburbia
Ever since he drew my attention some years ago to the best book I’ve read in the last decade – Time Will Darken It by William Maxwell – I have trusted Nicholas Lezard’s judgement. And if I...
Read moreDaughters of Time
Outbursts of memoir-writing by women followed both the English Civil Wars and the years 1789 to 1830 in France, the period encompassing the Revolution, Napoleon, the Restoration and the July...
Read moreAdmirin' Byron
That a romantic could have also been So classical is striking you’ll agree Though waxing passionate when we are green And cooler when mature is probably A change determined in the very gene Or...
Read moreAn Island Apart
Tikopia lies 1,500 miles east of Australia in that part of the Pacific known as Melanesia. But culturally Tikopia’s population is Polynesian. For reasons that are not entirely clear the Tikopia...
Read moreThe View from Denestornya
Count Miklos Banffy’s Transylvanian Trilogy is a long novel about the follies, beauties and shortcomings of Hungarian society in the decade leading up to the First World War. He wrote it during the...
Read moreA Perfect Nightmare
In 1935, Denton Welch – then an art student at Goldsmith’s College – was knocked off his bike on a busy road just outside Bromley. He spent over a year in hospital and was permanently weakened...
Read moreMade in Siberia
Every season a couple of wonderful biographies emerge whose reviews and sales might lead one to believe that they will stay bestsellers for ever. A year or two later they are in no greater demand...
Read moreHigh Life
Bad News by Edward St Aubyn is, quite simply, the best book ever written about drugs. Thomas de Quincey, Charles Baudelaire, Jean Cocteau, William Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson, Irvine Welsh and Will...
Read moreA Word in Your Ear
I am, literally, a bad reader. I have mild dyslexia and well remember, when reading Peyton Place in my youth, taking ‘sonofabitch’ as ‘sofabitch’ and thinking it was a piece of bordello...
Read morePosh but Down-to-Earth
Recently, I noticed a rather irritating poster on the Underground proclaiming: ‘You never forget your first time.’ It was an advertisement for a villa holiday company – bizarrely – but the...
Read morePeacock’s Progress
The ups and downs of literary reputations are often slightly mysterious. I still find it strange, though, that although we pay ample homage to most of the heavyweights of the nineteenth century, one...
Read moreA Past Relived
I first read Alison Uttley’s The Country Child over thirty years ago, when I was already in my twenties. I have always remembered it fondly, for it described a way of life that did not then seem so...
Read moreThe Tortoise and the Writer
The day before she died she was clambering over a pile of books on the floor of my study: novels used for teaching, reference books for the novel I was writing. She wasn’t used to being there. She...
Read more
