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.
In this issue: Selina Hastings meets a Mitford • David Fleming goes down with the Titanic • Laura Freeman accepts an invitation to the waltz • Tim Pears experiences the force of history • Polly Devlin is transported to Hollywood • Kristian Doyle loafs by the Seine • Rose Baring does the rounds with a country GP • Ian Thomson travels to Estonia and the world of Jaan Kross • Hazel Wood visits the Pimpernel Press • Edmund Gordon parties with Henry Green, and much more besides . . .
A Separate World • IAN THOMSON on Jaan Kross, The Czar’s Madman
Left, Left, Left • SELINA HASTINGS on Jessica Mitford, Hons and Rebels
An Obscure Form of Magic • EDMUND GORDON on Henry Green, Party Going
Giving Pain a Voice • ROSE BARING on John Berger, A Fortunate Man
A Vanished Warmth • ROBIN BLAKE on Humphrey Jennings, Pandaemonium
Loafing by the Seine • KRISTIAN DOYLE on Julian Green, Paris
The Last of Rome • SUE GAISFORD on Rosemary Sutcliff, Frontier Wolf & The Lantern Bearers
Worse Things Happen at Sea • DAVID FLEMING on Walter Lord, A Night to Remember
Progession by Digression • CHRISTIAN TYLER on Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
Branching Out • HAZEL WOOD on the Pimpernel Press
Blooming Marvellous • POLLY DEVLIN on Darcy O’Brien, A Way of Life, Like Any Other
The Force of History • TIM PEARS on Charles T. Powers, In the Memory of the Forest
Mood Music • LAURA FREEMAN on Rosamond Lehmann, Invitation to the Waltz
An Irresistable Cad • ANTHONY GARDNER on Guy de Maupassant, Bel-Ami
Going Loco • MARTIN SORRELL on Ian Allan’s book for trainspotters
Coal, Rent and Chaos • MICHAEL LEAPMAN on Gwyn Thomas, A Frost on My Frolic
Delivering a Missing Letter • KATE MORGAN on the crime novels of Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö
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.
‘If you love books, you’ll love Slightly Foxed’ Time Out
- Devlin, Polly
- Hastings, Selina
- Baring, Rose
- Berger, John
- Jennings, Humphrey
- Green, Julian
- Fleming, David
- Lord, Walter
- Sterne, Laurence
- Pimpernell Press
- Kross, Jaan
- O’Brien, Darcy
- Pears, Tim
- Powers, Charles T.
- Lehmann, Rosamond
- Ian Allan’s books for trainspotters
- Thomas, Gwyn
- Morgan, Kate
- Sjöwall, Maj & Wahlöö, Per
- Wahlöö, Per & Sjöwall, Maj
- Thomson, Ian
- De Maupassant, Guy
- Sorrell, Martin
- Sutcliff, Rosemary
- Tyler, Christian
- Wood, Hazel
- Pirkis, Gail & Wood, Hazel
- Watson, John
- Leapman, Michael
- Doyle, Kristian
- Gordon, Edmund
- Falcon, Tor
- Freeman, Laura
- Gaisford, Sue
- Gardner, Anthony
- Green, Henry
- Mitford, Jessica
Slightly Foxed Issue 67: From the Editors
There’s a fox’s earth on the cover of this issue, but thanks in large part to you, this Fox has far from gone to earth. We’ve loved receiving your encouraging messages and emails during this...
Read moreA Separate World
When I think back to that first visit of mine to Estonia in 1988, I see muted, metallic-grey tones of fog and sea; above all I remember a sense of wonder that I was finally on my way to my mother’s...
Read moreLeft, Left, Left
In the early 1980s I began working on my first book, a biography of Nancy Mitford. Four of the six Mitford sisters were then still living, Pamela in the Cotswolds, Diana in Paris with her second...
Read moreAn Obscure Form of Magic
I’ve just read Party Going (1939), Henry Green’s comic and melancholic masterpiece, for the third or fourth time, and I’m still not sure how to convey its complex flavour. It’s a...
Read moreGiving Pain a Voice
A lone doctor hares down a country lane in his Land Rover, his thumb jammed on the horn to warn the oncoming traffic that he’s not stopping. A woodman’s been pinned to the ground on a remote...
Read moreA Vanished Warmth
At school I loved our history lessons. I spent hours drawing plans of castles and battles, and was a binge reader of historical fiction by anyone from Rosemary Sutcliff and Henry Treece to Mary...
Read moreLoafing by the Seine
Sometimes, nostalgic for Paris, I read books about the city in the hope that through them I’ll know again the felt reality of daily life there. It never really works: books, after all, can only do...
Read moreThe Last of Rome
Desperation drove me to Horatius, one gloomy afternoon in late October. Thirty restless children were waiting to be entertained, educated or even just dissuaded from rioting by their hapless supply...
Read moreWorse Things Happen at Sea
Every child who enjoys reading will sooner or later begin to explore the world of grown-up books. The first ones I ever read were bought in an antique shop in the picturesque town of Cromarty on the...
Read moreProgression by Digression
In many ways The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is a maddening book. It is funny, of course, but also eccentric, anarchic and longwinded; and it’s hard to understand why it...
Read moreBranching Out
In keeping with its name, Pimpernel Press has put down its roots in an unassuming Victorian house hidden at the end of a pleasant street off West London’s Harrow Road. The only hint that a...
Read moreBlooming Marvellous
Sometime in the late 1990s, when I was staying in Dublin with my sister Marie Heaney and her husband Seamus, he was working on the introduction to a book called A Way of Life, Like Any Other, which I...
Read moreThe Force of History
‘My father once told me that our history is like a force behind us, pushing us along, unacknowledged or even unknown, but dictating the way we live our lives.’ In the Memory of the Forest by...
Read moreMood Music
‘Dance after dance with an old fogey. Three running now, pressed to his paunch.’ Oh, the hell of parties! The small humiliations. The shy, smudged-mascara, wallflower-grief of it all. Where was...
Read moreAn Irresistible Cad
Is it possible to love a book and hate it at the same time? That is the question that nags me whenever I think of Guy de Maupassant’s novel Bel-Ami (1885). It’s undoubtedly a masterpiece: the...
Read moreGoing Loco
Recently, lingering in my loft over books and back numbers of this journal and that, I stumbled on a photo of some schoolboys, paper and pencils in hand, sitting on a fence and watching a train go...
Read moreCoal, Rent and Chaos
A couple of years ago the judges for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction decided that none of the sixty two books submitted was funny enough to win, so they withheld the award....
Read moreDelivering a Missing Letter
A disused bus shelter in the market town of Sedbergh is a curious place for a quest to end, literary or otherwise. The town itself is rather curious too; geographically in Cumbria but on the wrong...
Read more
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