Slightly Foxed Issue 75

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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 on R. C. Sherriff, The Fortnight in September

An Extraordinary Ordinary Housewife • YSENDA MAXTONE GRAHAM on Nella Last’s War

Gaslight and Newgate Knockers • PATRICK WELLAND on the novels of Michael Cox

Seeing the Wood . . . • ISABEL LLOYD on books about trees

The Dream that Failed • ANTHONY WELLS on Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope against Hope

Monster-hunting • DAVID FLEMING on F. W. Holiday, The Great Orm of Loch Ness

An Uneasy Peace • ANNE BOSTON on Rose Macaulay, The World My Wilderness

A Martyr to the Truth • TIM BLANCHARD on Henri Troyat, Tolstoy

Ladies of Letters • ROGER HUDSON on the Stanley Letters

Philosophical Designs • MARIANNE FISHER on Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style

The Crème de la Crème • CHRISTOPHER RUSH on Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

A Nasty Business • ADAM SISMAN on H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

Fidget Pie • SUE QUINN on Florence White, Good Things in England

Lest We Forget • BRAD BIGELOW on Anon., My Name Is Million

Masefield’s Magic • BRANDON ROBSHAW on 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 . . .

‘Sometimes deep, sometimes surprising, often eccentric, but always unputdownable’ Posy Simmonds

Slightly Foxed Issue 75: From the Editors

Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

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...

Beside the Seaside

Galen O’Hanlen on R. C. Sherriff, The Fortnight in September

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...

An Extraordinary Ordinary Housewife

Ysenda Maxtone Graham on Nella Last’s War

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...

Gaslight and Newgate Knockers

Patrick Welland on the novels of Michael Cox

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);...

Seeing the Wood . . .

Isabel Lloyd on books about trees

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...

The Dream that Failed

Anthony Wells on Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope against Hope

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...

Monster-hunting

David Fleming on F. W. Holiday, The Great Orm of Loch Ness

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...

An Uneasy Peace

Anne Boston on Rose Macaulay, The World My Wilderness

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...

Ladies of Letters

Roger Hudson on the Stanley 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...

Ladies of Letters | An Appendix

Roger Hudson on the Stanley Letters

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...

A Martyr to the Truth

Tim Blanchard on Henri Troyat, Tolstoy

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...

Philosophical Designs

Marianne Fisher on Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style

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...

The Crème de la Crème

Christopher Rush on Murial Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

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...

A Nasty Business

Adam Sisman on H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

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...

Fidget Pie

Sue Quinn on Florence White, Good Things in England

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...

Lest We Forget

Brad Bigelow on Anon., My Name Is Million

‘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...

Masefield’s Magic

Brandon Robshaw on John Masefield, The Box of Delights

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...

Unpacking My Grandparents’ Books

C. J. Schüler on inheriting his 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...