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
Penelope Lively explores the genius of William Golding • Michael Moran entertains his Bulgarian lover • Christopher Hawtree meets a reclusive writer • Miranda Seymour goes orchid-hunting • William Palmer blows Louis Armstrong’s trumpet • Sarah Crowden meets an Edwardian It girl • Derek Robinson rewrites his CV • Justine Hardy follows the south-west monsoon • Rachel Campbell-Johnston gets the creepy-crawlies, and much more besides . . .
Waist-high in Kale • CHRISTIAN TYLER
Ivan Turgenev, A Sportsman’s Notebook
In Search of P. Y. Betts • CHRISTOPHER HAWTREE
P. Y. Betts, People Who Say Goodbye
Infinite Depths . . . • PENELOPE LIVELY
On the novels of William Golding
. . . and Tempests and Doldrums • ANDREW SINCLAIR
On the novels of William Golding
Every Other Inch a Gentleman • MICHAEL MORAN
Michael Arlen, The Green Hat
Cowboys, ‘Hottentots’ and the Vietcong • PATRICK DENMAN FLANERY
J. M. Coetzee, Dusklands
Tooth and Claw • RACHEL CAMPBELL-JOHNSTON
Gordon Grice, The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators
The Trouble with Idealism • MATTHEW J. REISZ
On private presses
A Kind of Redemption • VICTORIA NEUMARK
George Eliot, Adam Bede
South-West Monsoon • JUSTINE HARDY
Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family
A Bad Chooser of Husbands • HILARY TEMPLE
On the novels of Angela Thirkell
Natural the Way He Is • WILLIAM PALMER
Thomas Brothers (ed.), Louis Armstrong, in His Own Words
All the Fun of the Fair • PAUL WILLETTS
Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
A la Recherche • JOHN DE FALBE
Vesna Goldsworthy, Chernobyl Strawberries; Richard Wollheim, Germs
Edwardian It Girl • SARAH CROWDEN
E. Nesbit, Five Children and It
The Orchid Man • MIRANDA SEYMOUR
Jocelyn Brooke, The Scapegoat
The Book Hound
Slightly Foxed’s Book Hound has chosen some stimulating non-fiction titles
News from Alpha Centauri • DEREK ROBINSON
On literary awards
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.
- Literary awards
- The Book Hound
- Lively, Penelope
- Sillitoe, Alan
- Armstrong, Karen
- Sinclair, Andrew
- Cave, Roderick & Manson, Sarah
- Temple, Hilary
- Ganz, Marcella D.
- Thirkell, Angela
- Gekoski, Rick
- Turgenev, Ivan
- Robertson, Geoffrey
- Tyler, Christian
- Steinberg, Neil
- Willetts, Paul
- Tidcombe, Marianne
- Wollheim, Richard
- Watry, Maureen
- Private presses
- Pirkis, Gail & Wood, Hazel
- Arlen, Michael
- Betts, P. Y.
- Brooke, Jocelyn
- Brothers, Thomas
- Campbell-Johnston, Rachel
- Coetzee, J. M.
- Crowden, Sarah
- De Falbe, John
- Eliot, George
- Evans, George Ewart & Thompson, David
- Firmin, Hannah
- Flanery, Patrick Denman:
- Golding, William
- Goldsworthy, Vesna
- Grice, Gordon
- Hardy, Justine
- Hawtree, Christopher
- Moran, Michael
- Nesbit, E.
- Neumark, Victoria
- Ondaatje, Michael
- Palmer, William
- Reisz, Matthew J.
- Robinson, Derek
- Seymour, Miranda
Waist-high in Kale
Tsar Alexander II was warned that Turgenev’s collection of short stories, variously translated into English as Sketches from a Hunter’s Album or A Sportsman’s Notebook, was politically...
Read moreIn Search of P. Y. Betts
At a desk beneath the dome of the British Museum Reading Room, as sombre Ph.D. types on either side of me pored over earnest looking volumes, I had to restrain myself from yelling for joy at item NN...
Read moreInfinite Depths . . .
William Golding’s is not a large oeuvre: fifteen books, a play, an unfinished novel. Rereading everything, I am struck by the modesty of the pile through which I have worked, and the brevity of the...
Read more. . . and Tempests and Doldrums
William Golding was the only writer I have ever pursued. An Angry Young novel I wrote in three weeks when up at Cambridge, The Breaking of Bumbo, outsold Lord of the Flies that year for Faber &...
Read moreCowboys, ‘Hottentots’ and the Vietcong
Though J. M. Coetzee is now internationally fêted as South Africa’s second Nobel Laureate in Literature, his early novels remain largely ignored. His first, Dusklands, is especially worth...
Read moreTooth and Claw
The Red Hourglass, a debut volume by a writer called Gordon Grice, explores a fundamental premise. ‘We want the world to be an ordered room,’ its author writes, ‘but in the corner there hangs...
Read moreThe Trouble with Idealism
It was towards the end of his long life, after revolutionalizing many other aspects of design, that William Morris embarked on his ‘typographical adventure’ at the Kelmscott Press. Though it...
Read moreA Kind of Redemption
I’ve been a passionate reader all my life, be it of labels on jam jars or the small print on the back of tax forms, aged copies of free newspapers left on seats on the London Underground, Peter...
Read moreSouth-West Monsoon
Eight winters ago in India I fled the manila-folder-bound desiccation of Delhi for the south and Kerala. The backwaters there have a sensuality that slides about you as you enter, moving you away...
Read moreA Bad Chooser of Husbands
Do your favourite authors have a recognizable voice, so that you can identify them from a paragraph in the same way that you identify a voice over the telephone? Angela Thirkell has just such a...
Read moreNatural the Way He Is
It is a fair bet to say that, for most people under the age of 50, and those who are not jazz fans, the name Louis Armstrong is one associated – if recognized at all – with the sound of his voice...
Read moreA la Recherche
Halfway through Marilynne Robinson’s gorgeous novel Gilead, the narrator, John Ames, a 77-year-old preacher in Iowa, makes this observation: ‘Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on...
Read moreEdwardian It Girl
‘The small material objects that surround one’s daily life have always influenced me deeply,’ wrote E. (Edith) Nesbit in her memoir Long Ago When I Was Young. In my mother’s old nursery were...
Read moreThe Orchid Man
I owe the discovery of The Passing of a Hero and Conventional Weapons to a fellow-visitor to the London Library who, shrewdly interpreting the glazed stare of a fellow shelf-crawler, urged me to make...
Read moreNews from Alpha Centauri
I got lucky in 1971. In that year’s Booker prize I came 2nd, or so Saul Bellow, one of the judges, said. Coming 2nd, of course, was like coming 102nd; nevertheless it boosted my ego, which got a...
Read moreSlightly Foxed Issue 7: From the Editors
Sadly, just as we were celebrating the arrival of the summer issue, we lost a member of our team. On 15 June, Jennings the cocker spaniel died peacefully in his sleep at the age of 13. We miss him...
Read more
