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Slightly Foxed Issue 53
Slightly Foxed Issue 53, Cover by Alice Patullo. In this issue Adam Sisman accompanies George Smiley to The Circus • Alexandra Harris is moved by William Cowper’s letters • Jim McCue takes T. S. Eliot at his word • Maggie Fergusson lays ghosts with Hilary Mantel • Anthony Gardner examines the business of loving • Isabel Lloyd follows the way of the actor • Robin Blake maps out his reading • Pamela Beasant sees Orkney through fresh eyes • Charles Elliott mourns the lost world of the Xhosa • Katie Grant enjoys a Ruritanian adventure • David Beanland joins Arthur Ransome on the river bank • and much, much more . .
Slightly Foxed Issue 53, Cover by Alice Patullo. In this issue Adam Sisman accompanies George Smiley to The Circus • Alexandra Harris is moved by William Cowper’s letters • Jim McCue takes T. S. Eliot at his word • Maggie Fergusson lays ghosts with Hilary Mantel • Anthony Gardner examines the business of loving • Isabel Lloyd follows the way of the actor • Robin Blake maps out his reading • Pamela Beasant sees Orkney through fresh eyes • Charles Elliott mourns the lost world of the Xhosa • Katie Grant enjoys a Ruritanian adventure • David Beanland joins Arthur Ransome on the river bank • and much, much more . .
Slightly Foxed Issue 53, Cover by Alice Patullo. In this issue Adam Sisman accompanies George Smiley to The Circus • Alexandra Harris is moved by William Cowper’s letters • Jim McCue takes T. S. Eliot at his word • Maggie Fergusson lays ghosts with Hilary Mantel • Anthony Gardner examines the business of loving • Isabel Lloyd follows the way of the actor • Robin Blake maps out his reading • Pamela Beasant sees Orkney through fresh eyes • Charles Elliott mourns the lost world of the Xhosa • Katie Grant enjoys a Ruritanian adventure • David Beanland joins Arthur Ransome on the river bank • and much, much more . .
Slightly Foxed Issue 53, Cover by Alice Patullo. In this issue Adam Sisman accompanies George Smiley to The Circus • Alexandra Harris is moved by William Cowper’s letters • Jim McCue takes T. S. Eliot at his word • Maggie Fergusson lays ghosts with Hilary Mantel • Anthony Gardner examines the business of loving • Isabel Lloyd follows the way of the actor • Robin Blake maps out his reading • Pamela Beasant sees Orkney through fresh eyes • Charles Elliott mourns the lost world of the Xhosa • Katie Grant enjoys a Ruritanian adventure • David Beanland joins Arthur Ransome on the river bank • and much, much more . .
  • ISBN: 9781906562984
  • Pages: 96
  • Dimensions: 210 x 148mm
  • Illustrations: B/W
  • Publication date: 1 March 2017
  • Producer: Smith Settle
  • Cover artist: Alice Pattullo, ‘The Potting Shed’
  • ISSN: 1742-5794
Made in Britain

Slightly Foxed Issue 53

‘Circus Tricks’

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Open up a world of new reading with Slightly Foxed, the quarterly magazine for booklovers. Companionable, entertaining and elegantly produced, it’s more like a well-read friend than a literary review . . .

In this issue

Adam Sisman accompanies George Smiley to The Circus • Alexandra Harris is moved by William Cowper’s letters • Jim McCue takes T. S. Eliot at his word • Maggie Fergusson lays ghosts with Hilary Mantel • Anthony Gardner examines the business of loving • Isabel Lloyd follows the way of the actor • Robin Blake maps out his reading • Pamela Beasant sees Orkney through fresh eyes • Charles Elliott mourns the lost world of the Xhosa • Katie Grant enjoys a Ruritanian adventure • David Beanland joins Arthur Ransome on the river bank, and much, much more . . .


Circus Tricks • ADAM SISMAN

John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

A Flickering on the Staircase • MAGGIE FERGUSSON

Hilary Mantel, Giving up the Ghost

Moments of Truth • CHRISTOPHER RUSH

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

Dog Days • SARAH LAWSON

Albert Payson Terhune, Lad: A Dog

The Abyss Beyond the Orchard • ALEXANDRA HARRIS

William Cowper, The Centenary Letters

Stage Lightning • ISABEL LLOYD

Brian Bates, The Way of the Actor

A Lesson in Living • ALISON LIGHT

John McGahern, The Barracks

Bloody Conquest • CHARLES ELLIOTT

Noël Mostert, Frontiers

Taking the Poet at His Word • JIM McCUE

Editing The Poems of T. S. Eliot

Reading Maps • ROBIN BLAKE

Maps in books

Trouble in Ruritania • KATIE GRANT

Violet Needham, The Black Riders

Angling for a Bit of Peace • DAVID BEANLAND

Arthur Ransome, Rod & Line

Age of Innocence • ANTHONY GARDNER

Godfrey Smith, The Business of Loving

A Song of the Islands • PAMELA BEASANT

George Mackay Brown, An Orkney Tapestry

Time Out of War • JEREMY LEWIS

Robert Kee, A Crowd Is Not Company

Along the Old Ways • URSULA BUCHAN

W. H. Hudson, A Shepherd’s Life

The Book Cure • KEN HAIGH

Rediscovering the love of reading


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.

‘It looks and feels good. Its layout is stylish, the presentation is clear and uncluttered, its size is perfect for the crowded train journey, reading in bed, or the cramped fisherman’s tent, and it’s printed on high-quality cream-coloured vellum paper. And so everything about it exudes a degree of excellence . . .’ Caught by the River

‘If you need a good gift for someone who loves to read, or if you love to read and want a little treat for yourself, check out the delightful Slightly Foxed . . . these aren’t reviews, but personal recommendations. For people who read a lot, it can be hard to find new suggestions, but every time I read SF, I add several titles to my library list.’ Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

‘‘Produced by people who love books, for people who love books’’ Belgravia Books

‘It ranks as one of the more unusual publications I have ever come across and manages to be both literary and easily readable. I consider myself fairly well-read but Slightly Foxed never fails to dazzle me upon its arrival.’ Bookslut

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

‘Absolutely beautifully produced’ BBC Radio 4, Today



Slightly Foxed Issue 53: From the Editors

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...

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‘An oasis of literary joy . . .’

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

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

‘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...

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

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

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Angling for a Bit of Peace

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...

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A Flickering on the Staircase

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Trouble in Ruritania

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...

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Reading Maps

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...

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Taking the Poet at His Word

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....

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Bloody Conquest

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...

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A Lesson in Living

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...

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Stage Lightning

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...

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The Abyss Beyond the Orchard

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,...

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Dog Days

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...

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Moments of Truth

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...

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Circus Tricks

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...

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Age of Innocence

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...

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A Song of the Islands

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...

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Time Out of War

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...

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Along the Old Ways

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...

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The Book Cure

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...

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