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
Galen O’Hanlon does like to be beside the seaside • Marianne Fisher learns the elements of style • Christopher Rush meets Miss Jean Brodie in her prime • Ysenda Maxtone Graham enjoys a housewife’s wartime diaries • Sue Quinn celebrates English cooking • Anthony Wells hopes against hope • Isabel Lloyd takes a walk in the woods • Brandon Robshaw opens a box of delights • Adam Sisman witnesses a Martian invasion, and much more besides . . .
Beside the Seaside • GALEN O’HANLON
R. C. Sherriff, The Fortnight in September
An Extraordinary Ordinary Housewife • YSENDA MAXTONE GRAHAM
Gaslight and Newgate Knockers • PATRICK WELLAND
The novels of Michael Cox
Seeing the Wood . . . • ISABEL LLOYD
On books about trees
The Dream that Failed • ANTHONY WELLS
Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope against Hope
Monster-hunting • DAVID FLEMING
F. W. Holiday, The Great Orm of Loch Ness
An Uneasy Peace • ANNE BOSTON
Rose Macaulay, The World My Wilderness
A Martyr to the Truth • TIM BLANCHARD
Henri Troyat, Tolstoy
Ladies of Letters • ROGER HUDSON
The Stanley Letters
Philosophical Designs • MARIANNE FISHER
Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style
The Crème de la Crème • CHRISTOPHER RUSH
Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
A Nasty Business • ADAM SISMAN
H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds
Fidget Pie • SUE QUINN
Florence White, Good Things in England
Lest We Forget • BRAD BIGELOW
Anon., My Name Is Million
Masefield’s Magic • BRANDON ROBSHAW
John Masefield, The Box of Delights
Unpacking My Grandparents’ Books • C. J. SCHÜLER
On inheriting a small collection
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. More . . .
- Quinn, Sue
- Troyat, Henri
- Bigelow, Brad
- Sherriff, R. C.
- Stanley Letters, the
- Fleming, David
- Last, Nella
- Spark, Muriel
- White, Florence
- Fisher, Marianne
- Crawford, Martin
- Tolstoy, Leo
- Books, inheriting his grandparents’
- Macaulay, Rose
- Fitter, Alastair & More, David
- Hudson, Roger
- Anon. [Lucy Zoe Girling Zajdler]
- More, David & Fitter, Alastair
- Wells, Anthony
- Pakenham, Thomas
- Wells, H. G.
- Starr, Chris
- Woolfenden, Sarah
- Wohlleben, Peter
- Sisman, Adam
- Mandelstam, Nadezhda
- Lloyd, Isabel
- Cox, Michael
- Holiday, F. W.
- Blanchard, Tim
- Boston, Anne
- Masefield, John
- O’Hanlon, Galen
- Robshaw, Brandon
- Rush, Christopher
- Schüler, C. J.
Slightly Foxed Issue 75: From the Editors
The first crisp feel of autumn in the air is always exciting and somehow unexpected. Old tapes begin to play bringing back memories of new school terms and fresh beginnings, and the prospect of cosy...
Read moreBeside the Seaside
There is something timeless about the British seaside holiday. When I was a child we’d visit my grandparents, who had a beach hut at Studland on the Dorset coast. I would spend happy afternoons...
Read moreAn Extraordinary Ordinary Housewife
To her readers at the headquarters of the Mass Observation organization in London, she was merely a number (diarist 5353), an occupation (housewife), and an age (49). The labelling was bureaucratic...
Read moreGaslight and Newgate Knockers
Literary associations with drugs abound: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey (opium); Jean-Paul Sartre and W. H. Auden (Benzedrine); Charles Baudelaire and William Butler Yeats (hashish);...
Read moreSeeing the Wood . . .
Some books grow on you. Others help you grow. In January 1990, aged 24 and not long out of drama school, I landed a job: six months touring an Alan Ayckbourn play round secondary schools in northern...
Read moreThe Dream that Failed
Nadezhda Mandelstam was born Nadezhda Khazina in the southern Russian town of Saratov, on the Volga, in 1899, into a middle-class Jewish family. Her father was a lawyer and her mother a doctor, one...
Read moreMonster-hunting
As a child I had three great ambitions. The first was to go to the South Pole – I practised wandering off to die in a storm like Captain Oates whenever snow fell in the local park. Then there was...
Read moreAn Uneasy Peace
The World My Wilderness strikes me as an instance of fiction that reveals as much about time and place as bald historical facts. The novel is set in 1946, when countries, societies and most of all...
Read moreLadies of Letters
Virginia Woolf’s collections of essays, The Common Reader, The Death of the Moth and so on, reward those looking for interesting interstices within English literature. In the latter, in an essay...
Read moreLadies of Letters | An Appendix
There wasn’t space to include all the background information provided by Roger Hudson for his piece on the Stanley letters which appeared in Slightly Foxed Issue 75. For those who would like to...
Read moreA Martyr to the Truth
I was back home for Christmas and convalescing from the toxic fuzz induced by months of a student existence. I lay in bed mostly trying to ignore Anna Karenina, a brick of a Penguin Classic that I...
Read morePhilosophical Designs
Sometimes you come across a book that changes how you view the world. For me one such was Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style (1st ed. 1992). My father gave me a copy of the third...
Read moreThe Crème de la Crème
Muriel Spark’s most famous novel was published in 1961. It is set in 1930s Edinburgh, and the characters include schoolgirls at Marcia Blaine’s High School for Girls, the dull headmistress Miss...
Read moreA Nasty Business
H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1897) has long been one of my favourite books. I first read it half a century ago – when I was about 10, to judge by the date on my Penguin edition (price...
Read moreFidget Pie
Huffkins and Fleads, Surry Ponds and Manchets, Frumenty, Minnow Tansies and Fidget Pie. These evocative recipe titles were what first hooked me; fantastical-sounding to my ear, they might have sprung...
Read moreLest We Forget
‘Lost in Poland?’ the publisher Heinemann asked in October 1939 in a newspaper advertisement for Martin Hare’s new novel Polonaise. The last correspondence the publishers had had from the...
Read moreMasefield’s Magic
I was 8 when I first read John Masefield’s The Box of Delights – in the late 1960s, in the high-ceilinged classroom of a Victorian-built school in East London. I had not long been reading...
Read moreUnpacking My Grandparents’ Books
It is one of life’s ironies that when we are young, and keen to establish our own identity and place in the world, we have little interest in the experiences of older generations; by the time we...
Read more
