Slightly Foxed Issue 53

Slightly Foxed Issue 53: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

Spring, and it’s precisely thirteen years since the first issue of Slightly Foxed appeared. Then of course we had no idea of what SF would become – more of a friendly worldwide fellowship of...

‘An oasis of literary joy . . .’

Paul Kingsnorth

‘In a desert of internet conglomerates and soulless e-readers, Slightly Foxed is an oasis of literary joy.’ - Paul Kingsnorth

‘Slightly Foxed reviews books that I actually want to read’

The Aroma of Books

‘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...

‘If you are looking for a literary journal subscription then I highly recommend this one . . .’

‘A perfect publication for anyone wanting to extend their bookshelf’s variety’

Joanna’s Corner

Angling for a Bit of Peace

David Beanland on Arthur Ransome, Rod & Line

Arthur Ransome was a great admirer of Hazlitt and hankered after producing a series of essays himself. He would probably have considered that his journalism got in the way of that ambition, but in...

A Flickering on the Staircase

Maggie Fergusson on Hilary Mantel, Giving up the Ghost

Trouble in Ruritania

Katie Grant on Violet Needham, The Black Riders

The first in Violet Needham’s Ruritanian, or Stormy Petrel, sequence, The Black Riders is set in a fictional Central European empire. Though I’d never been to Austria, I imagined it to be...

Reading Maps

Robin Blake on maps in books

Last year the Bodleian Library paid £55,000 for a fold-out map torn from a copy of The Fellowship of the Ring and scribbled over by J. R. R. Tolkien. Maps, said one of the Bodleian curators, were...

Taking the Poet at His Word

Jim McCue on editing The Poems of T. S. Eliot

When T. S. Eliot summed up his life’s work in 1963, two years before he died, it was in a Collected Poems of fewer than 250 pages. But when Christopher Ricks and I published The Poems of T. S....

Bloody Conquest

Charles Elliott on Noël Mostert, Frontiers

There is a temptation to approach Noël Mostert’s Frontiers (1993) circumspectly, as you would the Grand Canyon or the Great Pyramid of Giza. It’s monumental – 1,292 pages, not counting index...

A Lesson in Living

Alison Light on John McGahern, The Barracks

Was any novelist – or journalist come to that – writing about breast cancer in the early 1960s? Did anyone – apart from the medical profession and a few bold souls – even talk about it? When...

Stage Lightning

Isabel Lloyd on Brian Bates, The Way of the Actor

I can’t remember which teacher told us to read his new book, ,The Way of the Actor (1986). But I can remember the sense of relief when I realized that, despite the icky subtitle – A New Path to...

The Abyss Beyond the Orchard

Alexandra Harris on William Cowper, The Centenary Letters

For about a hundred and thirty years after his death in 1800, William Cowper was one of those figures about whom every keen reader had something to say. He was up there with Milton and Johnson,...

Dog Days

Sarah Lawson on Albert Payson Terhune Lad: A Dog

If the subjects of our early reading determine what we become, I should long since have turned into a collie. As a child in the 1950s I read one book after another by Albert Payson Terhune about the...

Moments of Truth

Christopher Rush on Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

In a celebrated passage in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a girl is dancing – a young girl not yet out of her teens. She is an aristocrat, a countess from St Petersburg, and she is visiting the village...

Circus Tricks

Adam Sisman on John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

I first read John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy soon after it was published in 1974, and have reread it several times since. It is one of those books that never fails to give me...

Age of Innocence

Anthony Gardner on Godfrey Smith, The Business of Loving

Although the core of the story is set during the Second World War, the conflict barely registers beside what is, to the young hero, his raison d’être: the pursuit of an idealized lover. I must...

A Song of the Islands

Pamela Beasant on George Mackay Brown, An Orkney Tapestry

An Orkney Tapestry sits quietly at the heart of George Mackay Brown’s prolific output as a writer of poetry, stories, novels and plays, created over a life that was longer and richer than he or...

Time Out of War

Jeremy Lewis on Robert Kee, A Crowd Is Not Company

Every now and then a book is so badly published that it never quite recovers, however eloquent its admirers. Robert Kee’s account of the three years he spent in a German prisoner-of-war camp is one...

Along the Old Ways

Ursula Buchan on W. H. Hudson, A Shepherd’s Life

I spend a couple of weeks each year walking on the Lake District fells, so it is inevitable that I should have fallen upon James Rebanks’s remarkable The Shepherd’s Life (2015). I loved it, and I...

The Book Cure

Ken Haigh on rediscovering the love of reading

I wanted to call this ‘How Children’s Literature Saved My Life’, but the simple truth is that my life was never in any real danger. My imaginative life, however, was in grave peril. It hovered...