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: Anthony Longden enjoys the work of an irreverent Reverend • Ursula Buchan joins Richard Hillary at Fighter Command • Kate Tyte encounters a troublesome priest • David Gilmour follows Kipling to Simla • Jane Feaver remembers life at Faber and Faber • William Palmer examines Zeno’s conscience • Helena Drysdale goes upstream with The Little Grey Men • Patrick Welland meets an aristocratic cross-dresser • Sue Gee learns the language of exile . . .
Billiards, Tobacco and Wine • ANTHONY LONGDEN on Cuthbert Bede, The Adventures of Mr Verdant Green
A Confrontation with Evil • URSULA BUCHAN on Richard Hillary, The Last Enemy
Seeing Differently • ADAM FOULDS on The Collected Poems of Geoffrey Hill
In Search of Home • SUE GEE on Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation
Beside the Folly Brook • HELENA DRYSDALE on BB, The Little Grey Men & Down the Bright Stream
Labourers in Fetters • ROGER JONES on George Gissing, New Grub Street
Scandalous Tales from the Hills • DAVID GILMOUR on The Indian stories and poems of Rudyard Kipling
Her Own Mistress • VICTORIA NEUMARK on Margaret Irwin’s Tudor novels
Ridiculously Rich • PATRICK WELLAND on Felix Youssoupoff, Lost Splendour
Trouble at the Convent • KATE TYTE on Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudun
Not So Cosy After All? • ANDY MERRILLS on Alan Bradley’s Flavia de Luce novels
Life on the Fringe • JEREMY LEWIS on George Moore, Esther Waters
May Roses in Winter • WILLIAM PALMER on Italo Svevo, Zeno’s Conscience
The Big-hearted Little Duke • LINDA KELLY on Charlotte M. Yonge, The Little Duke
Getting to Know the Colonel • PAUL CHEESERIGHT on André Maurois, The Silence of Colonel Bramble
Through the Looking Glass • JANE FEAVER on life at Faber and Faber
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.
‘A wonderful publication, at once unpretentious and lively, edifying and fun. It manages to be not only a superb guide to many excellent books but also to offer writing of its own that is remarkably entertaining.’ The Author
‘I love Slightly Foxed. It’s a real hit with visitors, and it usually ends up in the loo.’ Damian Barr
‘Absolutely beautifully produced’ James Naughtie, BBC Radio 4, Today
- Youssoupoff, Felix
- BB
- Lewis, Jemma
- Bede, Cuthbert
- Hillary, Richard
- Hill, Geoffrey
- Hoffman, Eva
- Irwin, Margaret
- Pirkis, Gail & Wood, Hazel
- Tyte, Kate
- Bradley, Alan (author)
- Moore, George
- Svevo, Italo
- Kelly, Linda
- Yonge, Charlotte M.
- Cheeseright, Paul
- Lewis, Jeremy
- Lemaire, Angela
- Watson, John
- Trench, Anna
- Feaver, Jane
- Maurois, André
- Huxley, Aldous
- Watkins-Pitchford, Denys [‘BB’]
- Welland, Patrick
- Jones, Roger
- Kipling, Rudyard
- Buchan, Ursula
- Drysdale, Helena
- Foulds, Adam
- Gee, Sue
- Gilmour, David
- Gissing, George
- Longden, Anthony
- Merrills, Andy
- Neumark, Victoria
- Palmer, William
Slightly Foxed Issue 55: From the Editors
News came recently that sales of printed books have grown for the first time in four years while sales of ebooks have declined. ‘It would appear that there remains a special place in the...
Read more‘It brought back to me all the magical delight that my mother and I shared . . .’
‘I have just opened my newly delivered Slightly Foxed and gone straight to the article about The Little Grey Men and Down the Bright Stream. It has brought back to me all the magical delight that...
Read moreThrough the Looking Glass
By the end of the 1980s, in my mid-twenties, I’d been through university, a stint of unemployment, a couple of tread-water jobs, and come to a halt, a despondent Is this it? Not knowing what I...
Read moreCover Artist: Slightly Foxed Issue 55, Jemma Lewis, Hand-marbled paper, ‘Bloomsbury Blue & Orange Botanical’
After graduating in Textile Art in Norwich Jemma Lewis worked for several years at a local bookbinding firm where she became fascinated with the marbled papers found on the binding of antiquarian...
Read more‘In the pages of Slightly Foxed I have found my people . . .’
‘The current SF has many treasures; I’m especially struck by Sarah Perry’s piece on The Blue Field – I adore these blue flowers, admire Sarah Perry, and love ‘the Englishness of parsnip...
Read more‘The magazine has been a joy to receive . . .’
‘Many thanks for your letter confirming my subscription renewal to Slightly Foxed. Looking back it seems I first subscribed in 2007 – where did those 10 years go?! In all that time the magazine...
Read moreA Confrontation with Evil
It seems a rather odd thing to admit these days, but I spent much of my youth reading war comics and watching war films. That’s how it was if you lived in a house filled with boys in the 1960s. As...
Read moreIn Search of Home
Lost in Translation (1989) could not be more specific to time and place – lost and longed-for postwar Cracow, ‘a city of shimmering light and shadow’, of ‘narrow byways . . . echoing...
Read moreBilliards, Tobacco and Wine
I first happened across him while mining the rewarding and delightfully chaotic depths of a West Country bookshop. He has been out of fashion for a considerable time, always a recommendation as far...
Read moreSeeing Differently
On the cover was Gauguin’s rendition of Jacob wrestling with the angel from his Vision after the Sermon. On the back, Hill himself scowled out from under a supremely confident comb-over in an...
Read moreBeside the Folly Brook
In 1970 I told BB how much I loved his books. I wrote the letter sitting at the window in a house tucked into a Devon cliff, with pine woods behind and the sea in front. I’m sitting there now....
Read moreLabourers in Fetters
Like Dickens, Gissing shows us the Victorian city seen from below – grimy, fog-bound and peopled by creatures to whom life has not been kind. But unlike Dickens he speaks from lived experience of...
Read moreScandalous Tales from the Hills
Kipling was thorough and blatant in his search for characters and ‘copy’ when he was in Simla. Soon after arriving in the hills he would spend an afternoon loping alongside his mother’s...
Read moreHer Own Mistress
Like many another bookish teenager, I spent the years between 12 and 17 in a fog of romance, my nose buried in a book. Quite often that book was by Margaret Irwin, whose Tudor trilogy, Young Bess...
Read moreRidiculously Rich
It is a wonderfully self-serving record of an almost wholly unproductive life of enthusiastic indulgence. Felix’s world was so far removed from normal human experience that it seems, says Nicolai...
Read moreTrouble at the Convent
Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun (1952) – a book that could easily be subtitled ‘politically motivated witch-hunts and how to avoid them’ – feels horribly relevant. The Devils is about the...
Read moreNot So Cosy After All?
On the face of it, crimes don’t get much cosier than those which appear in the first six novels of the Flavia sequence. The convention of Slightly Foxed dictates that titles are normally tucked...
Read moreLife on the Fringe
I first read Esther Waters more than fifty years ago, when I was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin. As a young man I enjoyed reading tales of unmitigated woe, in which one disaster succeeds...
Read moreMay Roses in Winter
The preface is in the form of a rather tetchy report by a psychoanalyst who has been consulted by Zeno Corsini. The analyst says that he must apologize for having suggested that ‘my patient write...
Read moreThe Big-hearted Little Duke
Richard of Normandy, the hero of Charlotte Mary Yonge’s The Little Duke, is only 8 when the story begins. I must have been about the same age when I first read it and some of its scenes, with their...
Read moreGetting to Know the Colonel
Maurois was a literary celebrity of the 1920s and 1930s who became one of the French great and good after his election in 1938 to the Académie française. He had wanted to write from an early age...
Read more
The Real Person!
Author J. Barry acts as a real person and passed all tests against spambots. Anti-Spam by CleanTalk.
A huge thank you to Andy Merrills for introducing us to Alan Bradley’s Flavia de Luce adventures. Just the things to buy in ready for the darker evenings!