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: Laurie Graham pays an unusual visit to the Blandings piggery • Adam Foulds hangs out with a Russian count • Ursula Buchan meets some extremely likeable people • William Palmer gets a new angle on evolution • Olivia Potts picks fruit with Jane Grigson • Charles Elliott shares a fearful passage to Australia • Rebecca Willis enjoys ‘The Saga of the Century’ • Richard Conyngham finds he’s very up and down in the Andes • Peter Radford puts on a burst of speed • Pauline Melville struggles with Jane Austen, and much more besides . . .
One Man and His Pigs • LAURIE GRAHAM on James Hogg (ed.), Lord Emsworth’s Annotated Whiffle
A Romantic Escape • PATRICK FRENCH on Eric Newby, Love and War in the Apennines
Energetic Idleness • ADAM FOULDS on Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift
Hoofing It • RICHARD CONYNGHAM on Dervla Murphy, Eight Feet in the Andes
Extremely Likeable People • URSULA BUCHAN on the novels of O. Douglas
Antipodean Alcatraz • CHARLES ELLIOTT on Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore
Uncle Vanya Drops in • WILLIAM PALMER on Roy Lewis, The Evolution Man
Not Your Average Englishwoman • JUSTIN MAROZZI on Rosita Forbes, The Secret of the Sahara
Haikus among the Pears • OLIVIA POTTS on Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book
An Incurable Topophilia • ANDREW NIXON on the writings of Jonathan Meades
A Burning Issue • PIERS PLOWRIGHT on Cesare Pavese, The Moon and the Bonfires
Small Is Beautiful • MATT COLLINS on H. E. Bates, Through the Woods
Mood Music • REBECCA WILLIS on Rebecca West’s ‘Saga of the Century’
An Olympian Effort • PETER RADFORD on E. McDonald Bailey, If It’s Speed You’re After
Scoops of the Century • ANTHONY WELLS on Clare Hollingworth, There’s a German Just Behind Me
Ire and Irritability • PAULINE MELVILLE on reading Jane Austen
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 is a literary magazine that has the incomparable value of following its own way, the principles of pleasure and curiosity, rather than bobbing slavishly in the wake of publishing schedules. It’s always full of good things; but, more than that, it’s always full of unexpected things.’ Sam Leith
‘For people who read a lot, it can be hard to find new suggestions, and every time I read Slightly Foxed, I add several titles to my library list.’ Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project
‘A lovely production . . . it contains many riches.’ The Bookseller
- Pirkis, Gail & Wood, Hazel
- Meades, Jonathan
- Grigson, Jane
- Potts, Olivia
- Forbes, Rosita
- Hughes, Robert
- Douglas, O.
- Nabokov, Vladimir
- French, Patrick
- Hogg, James
- Graham, Laurie
- Cheese, Chloe
- Watson, John
- Willis, Rebecca
- West, Rebecca
- Wells, Anthony
- Plowright, Piers
- Pavese, Cesare
- Collins, Matt
- Radford, Peter
- Bailey, E. McDonald
- Hollingworth, Clare
- Melville, Pauline
- Bates, H. E.
- Austen, Jane
- Buchan, Ursula
- Conyngham, Richard
- Elliott, Charles
- Foulds, Adam
- Marozzi, Justin
- Murphy, Dervla
- Newby, Eric
- Nixon, Andrew
- Palmer, William
Slightly Foxed Issue 62: From the Editors
Here in the office, summer is when we try to relax a little, draw breath and catch up with the things for which there isn’t normally time. This year Jennie and Anna are further improving the...
Read moreA Romantic Escape
Love and War in the Apennines is a book of romantic escape, overseen by the suffering of war, which shows how it ripples out across society and into fragile human lives.
Read moreHaikus among the Pears
A Jane Grigson quotation sits on my desk. It’s written on a scrappy Post-it note; the glue on the back has picked up dust and a stray piece of cotton. It wasn’t meant to become a permanent...
Read moreOne Man and His Pigs
Many of you will already be acquainted with Clarence Threepwood, 9th Earl of Emsworth. You will know that in a life buffeted by bossy and opinionated women the Earl’s greatest consolation is his...
Read moreEnergetic Idleness
In Nabokov’s novel The Gift (1938) the young poet Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev is solitary and gifted. A virtuoso of perception, he sees around him many small, delightful details – a shopkeeper’s...
Read moreHoofing It
Unable to pedal but still able to walk, I had found inspiration in a battered copy of Eight Feet in the Andes wedged between the clothes and the spare tubes in my pannier. In the early 1980s, its...
Read moreExtremely Likable People
In the kind of house where books are handed down the generations, the chances are that on a spare bedroom bookshelf, squeezed between Guy Mannering and Roses, Their Culture and Management, you will...
Read moreAntipodean Alcatraz
Australia was born as a jail. Not until well into the eighteenth century was Europe aware of the place, and even then nobody could see much use for it. But the British, who claimed it, had serious...
Read moreUncle Vanya Drops In
I should read The Evolution Man, he said. He would lend it to me. I had never heard of its author, Roy Lewis, but pieced together some information about him. Born in 1913, educated at King Edward’s...
Read moreNot Your Average Englishwoman
I first encountered Rosita Forbes atop a camel in the middle of the Rabiana Sand Sea in southern Libya. There was probably no finer way of making this unusual writer’s acquaintance. Here, deep in...
Read moreAn Incurable Topophilia
For Meades is not a ‘television presenter’ at all, but rather an author who occasionally makes television programmes. His considerable written oeuvre includes fiction, memoir, reportage, cultural...
Read moreA Burning Issue
This is the tale of a baby, a book and a candle. The setting is the Sudan, the baby is our first-born, two-month-old Natasha, and the book is a great twentieth-century Italian novel. As for the...
Read moreSmall Is Beautiful
Among the books I’d assembled to help steer me through the boundless subject of trees and woodlands for a recent commission, H. E. Bates’s Through the Woods – a month-by-month account of a...
Read moreMood Music
Until I read the bit in Rebecca West’s This Real Night where one of the main characters dies, I’d never cried properly on a plane. I’ll admit to a bit of panicky sobbing during a bout of bad...
Read moreAn Olympian Effort
When I was a young man I was an international runner who held world sprint records and won medals in the European Championships, the Commonwealth Games and the Olympic Games. You would be right in...
Read moreScoops of the Century
Clare Hollingworth lived to the high old age of 105, spending much of her last years in the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in her adopted home of Hong Kong. Even at the age of 92 she was said to be...
Read moreIre and Irritability
I am having another stab at Jane Austen. Friends beg me to keep trying, anxious for me not to miss what they tell me is an unrivalled view of a luminous literary landscape. I have made efforts on and...
Read more
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