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: Jane Ridley meets the Queen • Derek Parker socializes with Eddie Marsh • Amanda Theunissen joins the quest for Kim • Richard Holloway finds redemption in art • Penelope Lively hears voices from the past • Anthony Wells continues his search for lost time • Laura Freeman discovers the tragedy behind the work of A. A. Milne • Michael Leapman sticks up (and sits down) for George Bernard Shaw • Ariane Bankes snaps up something wholesale, and much more besides . . .
A Crowning Achievement • JANE RIDLEY on Ben Pimlott, The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy
Misadventures in the Rag Trade • ARIANE BANKES on Eric Newby, Something Wholesale
Dying for a Dream • ROMESH GUNESEKERA on José Rizal, Noli Me Tangere
Let’s Bofe • LAURA FREEMAN on A. A. Milne, It’s Too Late Now
Out of the Celtic Twilight • ANTHONY GARDNER on Lord Dunsany, The Curse of the Wise Woman
Wit and Truth • ROGER HUDSON on the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Small Player in the Great Game • AMANDA THEUNISSEN on Rudyard Kipling, Kim & Peter Hopkirk, Quest for Kim
A Queer Parish • ANTHONY LONGDEN on Ruth Adam, A House in the Country
Making Manifest • RICHARD HOLLOWAY on André Schwarz-Bart, The Last of the Just
Dere Diary . . . • PETER PARKER on A Victorian Schoolboy in London: The Diary of Ernest Baker
A Tasmanian Tragedy • PENELOPE LIVELY on Matthew Kneale, English Passengers
High Society, Low Life • ANTHONY WELLS on Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
Journey to the Interior • KEN HAIGH on Matsuo Basho, The Narrow Road to the Deep North
The Man Who Enjoyed Everything • DEREK PARKER on Edward Marsh, A Number of People
A Boy in a Tattered Coat • ANN WROE on Henry Williamson, The Star-Born
GBS and Me • MICHAEL LEAPMAN on Watching the plays of George Bernard Shaw
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.
‘Slightly Foxed offers a chance to discover about eighty books a year that most of us have never heard of but all of us will wonder about. Strike a blow for good reading everywhere and order a sample issue. It’s all about books, really good books . . . I couldn’t be happier to have found this magazine’ BookSlut
- Rizal, José
- Lively, Penelope
- Pirkis, Gail & Wood, Hazel
- Haigh, Ken
- Watson, John
- Proust, Marcel
- Dalby, Claire
- Martineau, Luke
- Kipling, Rudyard
- Milne, A. A.
- Dunsany, Lord
- Basho, Matsuo
- Schwarz-Bart, André
- Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley
- Leapman, Michael
- Shaw, George Bernard
- Williamson, Henry
- Wroe, Ann
- Pimlott, Ben
- Rogers, David
- Marsh, Edward
- Adam, Ruth
- Kneale, Matthew
- Theunissen, Amanda
- Holloway, Richard
- Hopkirk, Peter
- Hudson, Roger
- Welch, Ronald
- Wells, Anthony
- Bankes, Ariane
- Freeman, Laura
- Gardner, Anthony
- Gunesekera, Romesh
- Longden, Anthony
- Newby, Eric
- Parker, Derek
- Parker, Peter
- Ridley, Jane
Slightly Foxed Issue 57: From the Editors
So, spring again, and it seems a good moment to report on what might be called the greening of Slightly Foxed. We’ve always been keen to be green and during the past year we’ve worked hard at it,...
Read moreA Crowning Achievement
Like so many Slightly Foxed readers, I was hooked by Netflix’s first series of The Crown. The lavish production, rumoured to have cost £100 million, the understated acting, the meticulous detail...
Read moreMisadventures in the Rag Trade
It remains one of the more surprising facts of life that the intrepid traveller Eric Newby, who by the time I knew him had the weatherbeaten cragginess of a man only happy when halfway up the Hindu...
Read moreDying for a Dream
Many writers have places, real or imagined, linked with their names – Joyce’s Dublin, Hardy’s Wessex, Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha – but I don’t know of any who have a province named after...
Read moreLet’s Bofe
What we expect from Milne is lightness. Pooh carried up by his balloon. Piglet blowing dandelion seeds. Bounding Tigger. The depth of missing, of emptiness when Ken is gone from It’s Too Late Now,...
Read moreOut of the Celtic Twilight
A teenage boy is talking to his father in the library of their rambling Irish house. His father tells him to look at a particular picture; the moment he obeys, four armed men enter the room. But when...
Read moreWit and Truth
I first delved into Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s astringent and witty letters about fifteen years ago when compiling a Book of Days for the Folio Society. I had to find extracts for each day of the...
Read moreSmall Player in the Great Game
Kim is the eponymous hero of Rudyard Kipling’s masterpiece, for many one of the best books about India ever written. It’s a strange, oddly constructed book intended for children, with no proper...
Read moreA Queer Parish
I was on a much-rehearsed trawl of the labyrinthine bookshop when I spotted it. A neat green-cloth country volume of the type churned out in their thousands in the 1940s and ’50s – years of...
Read moreMaking Manifest
Reading it changed how I thought about suffering. Not because it solved the dilemma I was wrestling with, but because it expressed it to an unbearable degree. It proved to me that the work of the...
Read moreDere Diary . . .
What I want from a diary is not necessarily remarkable events, but a vivid sense of the author’s character and of the times in which he or she lived. Though it covers a mere four months, Ernest...
Read moreA Tasmanian Tragedy
English Passengers is a masterpiece, an achievement of such complexity, ingenuity and sheer narrative power that each time I reread it I am newly surprised: how can a writer have thus conjured up the...
Read moreHigh Society, Low Life
Marcel Proust’s novel Remembrance of Things Past begins, as I discussed in an earlier piece (SF no. 56), with the narrator recalling the times he spent as a boy in his great-aunt’s house in the...
Read moreJourney to the Interior
The Japanese poet Matsuo Basho (1644–94) is renowned in the West as a master of haiku, but less well known is the fact that he was also a superb travel writer. He wrote five travel diaries, of...
Read moreThe Man Who Enjoyed Everything
If Sir Edward Marsh appears in a few literary reference books, it is as the editor of five anthologies of Georgian poetry published between 1911 and 1922, the idea for which came from Rupert Brooke....
Read moreA Boy in a Tattered Coat
The book was called The Star-Born. Its first chapters were about owls, especially one called Eldrich, which sounded to me like the shriek of doom heard before a death. The owls were frightening:...
Read moreGBS and Me
My enthusiasm for George Bernard Shaw dates from 1950, when I was 12. On my way home from school it was my habit to buy a copy of the Star, one of London’s three evening papers, principally to...
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