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Slightly Foxed Issue 52
  • ISBN: 9781906562953
  • Pages: 96
  • Dimensions: 210 x 148mm
  • Illustrations: B/W
  • Publication date: 1 December 2016
  • Producer: Smith Settle
  • Cover artist: Mark Hearld, ‘Papercut Foxes’
  • ISSN: 1742-5794
Made in Britain

Slightly Foxed Issue 52

‘A Gentleman on the Case’

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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

Nicola Shulman goes back to boarding-school • Oliver Pritchett lists the merits of Roget’s Thesaurus • Sarah Perry follows the fortunes of the Cazalets • Michael Holroyd is caught up in a royal romance • Jane Ridley sets sail with Beatty and Jellicoe • Ranjit Bolt joins The Rotters’ ClubBrandon Robshaw plays detective with Margery Allingham • Lucy Lethbridge finds sustenance in Food in EnglandChristian Tyler sees Russia through the eyes of Doctor Zhivago • Maggie Fergusson unravels threads of memory with P. D. James, and much, much more . . .

Contents & Bibliography

A Gentleman on the Case • BRANDON ROBSHAW

The Albert Campion novels of Margery Allingham

Old Girls and Very Old Girls • NICOLA SHULMAN

Ysenda Maxtone Graham, Terms & Conditions

The Writing on the Wall • RANJIT BOLT

Jonathan Coe, The Rotters’ Club

That Essex Boy • MICHAEL HOLROYD

Lytton Strachey, Elizabeth and Essex

At Home with the Cazalets • SARAH PERRY

Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet Chronicles

How We Lived Then • LUCY LETHBRIDGE

Dorothy Hartley, Food in England

Chesterton’s Spell • GORDON BOWKER

G. K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles

The Price of Revolution • CHRISTIAN TYLER

Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago

Sunk by the Signal Book • JANE RIDLEY

Andrew Gordon, The Rules of the Game

Well Earthed • RICHARD PLATT

David Grayson, Adventures in Contentment

A Ghost in the Green Room • SARAH CROWDEN

J. B. Priestley, Jenny Villiers

The Threads of Memory • MAGGIE FERGUSSON

P. D. James, Time to Be in Earnest

Glorious Gossip • ROGER HUDSON

The Creevey Papers

Myth and Magic • SOPHIE BREESE

Susan Cooper’s ‘The Dark Is Rising’ quintet

Goings-on in the Garden of Eden • WILLIAM PALMER

P. G. Wodehouse, Uncle Fred in the Springtime

He Had His Little Lists • OLIVER PRITCHETT

On Peter Mark Roget’s Thesaurus


About Slightly Foxed

Eclectic, elegant and entertaining, Slightly Foxed is the literary magazine for nonconformists, for people who don’t want to read only what the big publishers are hyping and the newspapers are reviewing. There are thousands of good books in print that are never mentioned in the literary pages, but most people have no way of knowing what they are or which ones may appeal to them. Slightly Foxed fills this gap, introducing, or reintroducing, its readers to all those wonderful books that languish on publishers’ backlists but have too often disappeared from bookshops.

Its contributors are established writers, journalists and people from other fields who share their passion for particular books and authors. Since it is entirely independent, Slightly Foxed is free to follow its own bent, to promote unfashionable enthusiasms, to celebrate the offbeat and the unusual. Contributors are encouraged to discuss their chosen books with passion and wit, to air arcane knowledge, to delight in eccentricity and to share the joys of exploring the extraordinary, the little-known and the downright peculiar.

So whether you’re in search of stimulation, consolation or diversion, a treat for yourself or a present for a friend or relative, you might do worse than take out a subscription to Slightly Foxed. If you do, you’ll be in excellent company. Read more about Slightly Foxed.

 

‘Absolutely beautifully produced’ BBC Radio 4, Today

‘Read one issue back to back and you could cross every conceivable reader off your Christmas present list’ Paris Review

‘A heartfelt celebration of writing that has stood the test of time’ Telegraph

‘I never read an issue without making several terrific discoveries’ Gretchen Rubin, Forbes Magazine



Slightly Foxed Issue 52: From the Editors

The lights in the Slightly Foxed office are staying on a little later now in the run-up to Christmas. Anna, Olivia, Katy and Hattie, our newest member of staff, have been in overdrive, dealing with...

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Croquet

‘One blazing sunny afternoon he finds himself for some inexplicable reason playing a game of croquet. He is a poor player up against a very good one, but he takes this as a pretext to expound a...

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At 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...

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Cover Artist: Slightly Foxed Issue 52, Mark Hearld, ‘Papercut Foxes’

Born in 1974, Mark Hearld studied illustration at Glasgow School of Art and then completed an MA in Natural History Illustration at the Royal College of Art. Taking his inspiration from the flora and...

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‘Thank you so much for the review of the Cazalet Chronicles . . .’

‘Thank you so much for the review of the Cazalet Chronicles last year. On the basis of that I have now read all five, my mother is enjoying them also, and my eldest sister is next in line. None of...

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The Writing on the Wall

I harbour – perversely, you might think – the fondest memories of two much maligned phenomena: the 1970s and Birmingham. I was lucky, of course. I had a relatively pleasant, carefree adolescence,...

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A Gentleman on the Case

What do you feel like reading, curled up in your armchair? Obviously, a whodunnit. But not just any old whodunnit. You don’t want the colourless style and arid tricksiness of Agatha Christie, nor...

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That Essex Boy

‘The natural pleasure of reading it is enormous,’ wrote Maynard Keynes to his friend Lytton Strachey on coming to the end of Elizabeth and Essex. ‘You seem, on the whole, to imagine yourself as...

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Chesterton’s Spell

Whenever I’m asked who my favourite schoolteacher was, I don’t hesitate. His name was Bill Drysdale and he taught me English when I was barely into my teens. He was tall and charismatic, with a...

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The Price of Revolution

Anyone who was around in the mid-1960s can probably whistle ‘Lara’s Theme’, and quite a few will remember the film for which the tune was written, in which the glamorous Julie Christie and Omar...

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Sunk by the Signal Book

The Rules of the Game is a work of military history, a genre which I have always seen as male-dominated and which I usually avoid. There are no women in this book. The only females are ships....

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Well 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....

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The Threads of Memory

I remember her most vividly gliding down from the first floor of her Holland Park house on a Stannah stairlift. Generally speaking these contraptions suggest dénouement and decline. Not with P. D....

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A Ghost in the Green Room

The subtitle of J. B. Priestley’s Jenny Villiers – ‘A Story of the Theatre’ – was what caught my attention when I came across it in a dilapidated barn in West Sussex, where the cooing of...

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Myth and Magic

When I was 10 I read Susan Cooper’s Over Sea, Under Stone for the first time. And I will never forget the moment on p. 218 in my now broken-backed copy of this novel when I experienced what I can...

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Glorious Gossip

A glance at the back of the title page of The Creevey Papers showed that Murray had reprinted it ten times in as many years following the book’s first appearance in 1903 – a good indication that...

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Goings-on in the Garden of Eden

My father’s two favourite books, which he seemed to reread almost annually, were Dickens’s Pickwick Papers, and Uncle Fred in the Springtime, by P. G. Wodehouse. Both are distinguished by...

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He Had His Little Lists

‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.’ You see, even Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a bit of a list-maker. Of course, our love affair with lists goes back a lot further than her. Think of...

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Comments & Reviews

Leave your review

  1. Somewhere, sometime, in the not-so-distant past, someone mentioned something about Slightly Foxed, and whatever it was that that someone said intrigued me, so I looked it up – and subscribed almost immediately. A quarterly literary magazine, Slightly Foxed reviews books that I actually want to read – not pretentious novels that only the literary elite can understand, but warm and comfortable books that have withstood the years to remain well-loved and engaging. As SF itself says, it “introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal.”

    Because I enjoyed reading my first issue so much, and because it added multiple books to my TBR, I thought that I would take a post to review the reviews as it were . . .

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