‘Opening Slightly Foxed triggered one of those moments when you have to ask yourself, “How it is possible that I did not know this existed until now?”. . . it will likely give you a lot of ideas of things you’d like to read someday, but it’s also enjoyable to just read someone’s description and stories about a book they love.’ Books, The Universe & Everything
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
Helen MacEwan is touched by the life of William Cowper • Christopher Rush finds much to be gained from Paradise Lost • Maggie Fergusson talks travel with Colin Thubron • Andy Merrills has a brush with some beards • Ann Kennedy Smith meets E. M. Forster’s great-aunt • Ariane Bankes explores Trieste with Jan Morris • Robin Blake recommends some spiritual reading • Sarah Perry gets to the roots of Englishness • Patrick Welland witnesses power struggles in Ancient Rome • Julie Welch joins the Pony Club and much more besides . . .
A Snatch of Morning • HELEN MACEWAN
David Cecil, The Stricken Deer
Sprouts and Parsnip Wine • SARAH PERRY
John Moore, The Blue Field
The Price of Power • PATRICK WELLAND
John Williams, Augustus
Travelling Fearlessly • MAGGIE FERGUSSON
The travel writing of Colin Thubron
An Epic Achievement • CHRISTOPHER RUSH
John Milton, Paradise Lost
Pony-mad • JULIE WELCH
Ruby Ferguson’s ‘Jill’ books
Hands across the Tea-shop Table • SUE GEE
Elizabeth Taylor, A Game of Hide and Seek
Marcel • ANTHONY WELLS
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
Streams of Consciousness • RICHARD PLATT
Henry Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
Prayers before Plenty • ANN KENNEDY SMITH
E. M. Forster, Marianne Thornton, 1707–1887
Spiritual Reading • ROBIN BLAKE
H. F. M. Prescott, The Man on a Donkey
Holding a Mirror • JOHN CONYNGHAM
William Plomer, Turbott Wolfe
Man on the Run • DEREK COLLETT
John Mair, Never Come Back
Melancholy but Marvellous • ARIANE BANKES
Jan Morris, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere
Hair Today and Gone Tomorrow • ANDY MERRILLS
Reginald Reynolds, Beards: An Omnium Gatherum
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.
- Beauman, Nicola
- Proust, Marcel
- Smith, Ann Kennedy
- George, Debbie
- Prescott, H. F. M.
- MacEwan, Helen
- Plomer, William
- Taylor, Elizabeth
- Cecil, David
- Mair, John
- Thoreau, Henry
- Williams, John
- Reynolds, Reginald
- Welland, Patrick
- Thubron, Colin
- Wells, Anthony
- Milton, John
- Pirkis, Gail & Wood, Hazel
- Carey, John
- Welch, Julie
- Watson, John
- Ferguson, Ruby
- Bankes, Ariane
- Blake, Robin
- Collett, Derek
- Conyngham, John
- Fergusson, Maggie
- Forster, E. M.
- Gee, Sue
- Merrills, Andy
- Moore, John
- Morris, Jan
- Perry, Sarah
- Platt, Richard
- Rush, Christopher
Slightly Foxed Issue 58: From the Editors
For some months now the office in Hoxton Square has been ringing to the sounds of hammering, banging, drilling, and tools dropping on to scaffolding, and we’ve often struggled to hear one another...
Read moreHair Today and Gone Tomorrow
Five or six summers ago, I was browsing in a shabbily genteel second-hand bookstore in a university town somewhere in the middle of the United States. The shop had a substantial stock of fiction, a...
Read moreMan on the Run
In 1990, I watched a drama series on the BBC called Never Come Back. It was a superb Second World War thriller with a fine cast including James Fox, Nathaniel Parker and Martin Clunes. Then about a...
Read moreHolding a Mirror
Early in 1925 there arrived at the Hogarth Press in London’s Tavistock Square a parcel, sent from Zululand, containing the manuscript of Turbott Wolfe, the first novel of an unknown writer named...
Read moreSpiritual Reading
Hilda Prescott was a professional historian, and a biographer of Queen Mary Tudor, who knew the sixteenth century like the back of her falconer’s glove. She was also a natural novelist who carried...
Read morePrayers before Plenty
In 1953 the writer E. M. Forster, then aged 74, was sorting through old family papers and thinking about the past. He had recently moved back to King’s College, Cambridge, and the high-ceilinged...
Read moreStreams of Consciousness
Life had been kind to the Thoreau brothers. They were fit, healthy, enjoyed nothing so much as their time together in the open air, and having successfully taken over the Concord Academy, the local...
Read moreSprouts and Parsnip Wine
Early one morning, late in July, the villagers of ‘crack-brained Brensham’ woke to a remarkable spectacle. There amid the customary colours of furze and wheat was a seven-acre field that ‘had...
Read moreThe Price of Power
Octavian laid down the ideological and institutional framework which would sustain that empire for the next 400 years. He died aged 76 in AD 14 having been granted the honorific title of Augustus...
Read moreA Snatch of Morning
I bought David Cecil’s Life of William Cowper, The Stricken Deer, at a time, in my early twenties, when I was starting to devour literary biography, my preferred reading ever since. I was by then...
Read moreTravelling Fearlessly
In 1992, I started working for a strange but beguiling organization. The Royal Society of Literature was, in those days, housed in a huge, dilapidated mansion in Bayswater, and it was there that its...
Read moreAn Epic Achievement
Paradise Lost was first published 350 years ago in 1667, and was still being hailed and even enjoyed as an epic achievement (literally) into the early twentieth century. Now it’s almost unread,...
Read morePony-mad
Ruby Ferguson wrote nine ‘Jill’ books, of which Jill’s Gymkhana is the first. Originally published in 1949 by Hodder & Stoughton, it was beautifully illustrated by ‘Caney’, and priced at 7s...
Read moreHands across the Tea-shop Table
The novel is set in the 1920s and 1940s. Both world wars are elided, the one before it opens, the other between one chapter and the next, but in the background is the fierce struggle of the...
Read more
The forget me not cover art is one the prettiest ever. Thank you for brightening the day quarterly.