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’ Club • Brandon Robshaw plays detective with Margery Allingham • Lucy Lethbridge finds sustenance in Food in England • Christian Tyler sees Russia through the eyes of Doctor Zhivago • Maggie Fergusson unravels threads of memory with P. D. James, and much, much more . . .
A Gentleman on the Case • BRANDON ROBSHAW on the Albert Campion novels of Margery Allingham
Old Girls and Very Old Girls • NICOLA SHULMAN on Ysenda Maxtone Graham, Terms & Conditions
The Writing on the Wall • RANJIT BOLT on Jonathan Coe, The Rotters’ Club
That Essex Boy • MICHAEL HOLROYD on Lytton Strachey, Elizabeth and Essex
At Home with the Cazalets • SARAH PERRY on Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet Chronicles
How We Lived Then • LUCY LETHBRIDGE on Dorothy Hartley, Food in England
Chesterton’s Spell • GORDON BOWKER on G. K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles
The Price of Revolution • CHRISTIAN TYLER on Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
Sunk by the Signal Book • JANE RIDLEY on Andrew Gordon, The Rules of the Game
Well Earthed • RICHARD PLATT on David Grayson, Adventures in Contentment
A Ghost in the Green Room • SARAH CROWDEN on J. B. Priestley, Jenny Villiers
The Threads of Memory • MAGGIE FERGUSSON on P. D. James, Time to Be in Earnest
Glorious Gossip • ROGER HUDSON on The Creevey Papers
Myth and Magic • SOPHIE BREESE on Susan Cooper’s ‘The Dark Is Rising’ quintet
Goings-on in the Garden of Eden • WILLIAM PALMER on P. G. Wodehouse, Uncle Fred in the Springtime
He Had His Little Lists • OLIVER PRITCHETT on 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
- Creevey, Thomas
- Shulman, Nicola
- Strachey, Lytton
- Holroyd, Michael
- Tyler, Christian
- Howard, Elizabeth Jane
- Hudson, Roger
- James, P. D.
- Wodehouse, P. G.
- Lethbridge, Lucy
- Pirkis, Gail & Wood, Hazel
- Faber & Faber
- Allingham, Margery
- Bolt, Ranjit
- Bowker, Gordon
- Breese, Sophie
- Chesterton, G. K.
- Coe, Jonathan
- Cooper, Susan
- Crowden, Sarah
- Fergusson, Maggie
- Gordon, Andrew
- Graham, Ysenda Maxtone
- Grayson, David
- Hartley, Dorothy
- Hearld, Mark
- Palmer, William
- Pasternak, Boris
- Perry, Sarah
- Platt, Richard
- Priestley, J. B.
- Pritchett, Oliver
- Ridley, Jane
- Robshaw, Brandon
- Roget, Peter Mark
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...
Read moreCroquet
‘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...
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 moreCover 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...
Read more‘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...
Read moreThe 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,...
Read moreA 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...
Read moreThat 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...
Read moreChesterton’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...
Read moreThe 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...
Read moreSunk 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....
Read moreWell 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....
Read moreThe 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....
Read moreA 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...
Read moreMyth 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...
Read moreGlorious 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...
Read moreGoings-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...
Read moreHe 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...
Read more
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 . . .