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: Henry Jeffreys props up the bar with Kingsley Amis • Marianne Fisher rings the changes • Adam Sisman goes back to Middlemarch • Victoria Neumark enters the realms of gold • Anthony Longden is intrigued by the story of a fire • Posy Fallowfield finds comfort in William Trevor • Richard Crockatt faces up to Gibbon • Frances Donnelly falls for an unusual private investigator • Laurence Scott smokes the pipe of peace, and much more besides . . .
Ring Out, Wild Bells! • MARIANNE FISHER on Jasper Snowdon, Diagrams
Golden Fire • KATE YOUNG on Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie
Life Is the Thing • ADAM SISMAN on George Eliot, Middlemarch
A Lost Enchanted World • CHARLOTTE MOORE on Arthur Ransome, Old Peter’s Russian Tales
Strangely Prophetic • ANTHONY LONGDEN on Simon Harcourt-Smith, The Last of Uptake
The Thrillers You Keep • FRANCES DONNELLY on Ross Macdonald, The Moving Target
Put That in Your Pipe . . . • LAURENCE SCOTT on Alfred Dunhill, The Pipe Book
A Merry Malady • RICHARD PLATT on Holbrook Jackson, The Anatomy of Bibliomania
Something Wicked This Way Comes • SAM LEITH on the short stories of Ray Bradbury
No Ribaldry Please, We’re British • VICTORIA NEUMARK on Francis Turner Palgrave, The Golden Treasury
Accentuating the Positive • ANTHONY QUINN on Molly Hughes, A London Child of the 1870s
Scaling Gibbon’s Everest • RICHARD CROCKATT on Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
The Magnetism of Murder • ALASTAIR GLEGG on Emlyn Williams, Beyond Belief & Dr Crippen’s Diary
Just the Way It Is • POSY FALLOWFIELD on William Trevor, The Story of Lucy Gault
Poor Show • PETER DAY on Alex Atkinson and Ronald Searle, The Big City
Cheers! • HENRY JEFFREYS on Bernard DeVoto, The Hour & Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking
These Old Bones • DAN RICHARDS on writers’ totems
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.
‘The magazine is beautifully made, and it’s one of the few quarterlies we read cover-to-cover the moment it arrives.’ Erik Heywood, Book/Shop, Oakland
- Dunhill, Alfred
- Leith, Sam
- Young, Kate
- Bickford-Smith, Coralie
- Fisher, Marianne
- Snowdon, Jasper
- Lee, Laurie
- Moore, Charlotte
- Macdonald, Ross
- Fallowfield, Posy
- Bradbury, Ray
- Palgrave, Francis Turner
- Quinn, Anthony
- Hughes, Molly
- Gibbon, Edward
- Williams, Emlyn
- Trevor, William
- Day, Peter
- Glegg, Alastair
- Harcourt-Smith, Simon
- Searle, Ronald & Atkinson, Alex
- Atkinson, Alex & Searle, Ronald
- Writers’ totems
- Richards, Dan
- DeVoto, Bernard
- Jeffreys, Henry
- Pirkis, Gail & Wood, Hazel
- Jackson, Holbrook
- Sisman, Adam
- Watson, John
- Crockatt, Richard
- Amis, Kingsley
- Donnelly, Frances
- Eliot, George
- Longden, Anthony
- Macklin, Daniel
- Neumark, Victoria
- Platt, Richard
- Ransome, Arthur
- Scott, Laurence
- Searle, Ronald
Slightly Foxed Issue 68: From the Editors
After probably the strangest year that most of us have ever experienced, London is starting to feel more familiar. There are lighted office windows around Hoxton Square, and there’s traffic again...
Read moreRing Out, Wild Bells!
Imagine you are walking in the English countryside and come to a village. As the day is hot and the church is open, you step inside to look around and rest in the predictably cool and dim interior....
Read moreGolden Fire
I write these words, appropriately enough, in The Woolpack – the Slad pub that once claimed Laurie Lee as its most famous patron – with a pint of cider at my elbow. From one window, the view dips...
Read moreLife is the Thing
Recently I decided to reread George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–2). Half a lifetime had passed since my first reading. I remembered how satisfying I had found the book then; now I wondered how I...
Read moreA Lost Enchanted World
Not long ago, in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, I was transfixed by a vast oil painting; Viktor Vasnetsov’s Bogatyrs (Men of Power) – astride their horses, one brown, one black, one white. I...
Read moreStrangely Prophetic
I always take particular pleasure in people’s stories about how they discover books. For me, the process is quite conventional, more often than not the result of a trip to the London Library,...
Read moreThe Thrillers You Keep
Ink has been spilt debating when genre novels become literary fiction. My rule of thumb for recognizing the best in any genre is this: notice what books you keep, won’t lend and need to reread...
Read morePut That in Your Pipe . . .
One wouldn’t normally associate a book on pipes and pipe-smoking with deceit, guilt and posterior discomfort. This is how it happened. It was 1964. I was a scholastically challenged 14-year-old...
Read moreA Merry Malady
Let’s begin with a brief quiz. Have you ever arrived home, triumphant with glee over your latest bookshop find, only to discover that you already have the book you just purchased? Have you ever...
Read moreSomething Wicked This Way Comes
My dad turned me on to Ray Bradbury. The short stories had captivated him in his late teens and early twenties, and on his shelf was a two-volume Grafton paperback collection of them.
Read moreNo Ribaldry Please, We’re British
Our family Bible came from our mum’s side. But our real missals were her poetry books – Come Hither, edited by Walter de la Mare, and The Golden Treasury, edited by Francis Turner Palgrave. Now I...
Read moreAccentuating the Positive
According to my journal I first read Molly Hughes’s memoir A London Child of the 1870s in October 2005, ‘a record of Islington life so charming and droll I’m puzzled as to why I’d not come...
Read moreScaling Gibbon’s Everest
Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788) must rank among the best known of unread or partly read books. At over 3,000...
Read moreThe Magnetism of Murder
In 1957 I was a schoolboy in what was then known as Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, when Arnold Jones, my English teacher, insisted that we all go with him to hear his compatriot, the Welsh author and...
Read moreJust the Way It Is
I first came across William Trevor in the early nineties when my son came home from school with The Children of Dynmouth, his GCSE set text. I’ve been an ardent fan ever since, although I must...
Read morePoor Show
I must have bought The Big City soon after it was published in 1962, when Penguin was branching out from its then standard paperback format into slightly larger books with pictures, often cartoons....
Read moreCheers!
Sayre’s Law states: ‘In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake.’ I’ve noticed this in the world of booze. Some people take the...
Read moreThese Old Bones
A few days before my birth my father returned from an Arctic expedition. He’d been away for several months on Svalbard – a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, halfway between continental...
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