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Slightly Foxed Issue 76
Slightly Foxed Issue 76 Winter 2022 - Slightly Foxed Subscriptions
  • ISBN: 9781910898734
  • Pages: 96
  • Dimensions: 210 x 148mm
  • Illustrations: B/W
  • Publication date: 1 December 2022
  • Producer: Smith Settle
  • Cover Artist: John Broadley, ‘Time at the Fox Inn’
  • ISSN: 1742-5794
Made in Britain

Slightly Foxed Issue 76

‘String is my Foible’

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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

Felicity James learns lessons in Cranford • Tom Hodgkinson is impressed by Uncle Quentin • Isabel Lloyd goes further into the wood • Jonathan Law pursues a man with many names • Pamela Beasant squeezes into a very independent bookshop • Anthony Gardner gets confused in Ruritania • Posy Fallowfield curls up with Shirley Hughes • Mathew Lyons remembers old Broadway • William Palmer goes birdwatching, and much more besides . . .


‘String is my foible’ • FELICITY JAMES

Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford

Shall I Be Me? • DEREK PARKER

Colin Clark, The Prince, the Showgirl and Me

Uncle Quentin Revisited • TOM HODGKINSON

Enid Blyton, Five on Kirrin Island Again

Surprised by Joy • KRISTIAN DOYLE

Adam Zagajewski, Slight Exaggeration

A Northern Survivor • PAMELA BEASANT

Stromness Books & Prints, Orkney

Double Trouble • ANTHONY GARDNER

Anthony Hope, The Prisoner of Zenda

. . . from the Trees • ISABEL LLOYD

On books about trees, Part II

A Recording Angel • ANTHONY QUINN

Geoffrey Fletcher, The London Nobody Knows

The Thread that Binds Them • URSULA BUCHAN

A. P. Wavell (ed.), Other Men’s Flowers

Reaping the Whirlwind • RICHARD PLATT

William Safire, Freedom: A Novel of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War

The Sweetest Note of All Others • WILLIAM PALMER

David Lack, The Life of the Robin

Quick Brains and Slow Tongues • MATHEW LYONS

The short stories of Damon Runyon

A Friendly Looking Lot • POSY FALLOWFIELD

The children’s books of Shirley Hughes

An Olympian Scoundrel • JONATHAN LAW

Bernard Wasserstein, The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln

Mr Gryce Meets His Match • KATE TYTE

Anna Katharine Green, That Affair Next Door

Twice Upon a Time • ALASTAIR GLEGG

Fairy tales for grown-ups


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 . . . 



Slightly Foxed Issue 76: From the Editors

This issue of Slightly Foxed comes with our very best wishes to you all from all of us here for Christmas and the coming year. However there’s no escaping the fact that these are anxious times, and...

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‘String is my foible’

A tarnished silver teapot. A tin of buttons, their parent garments long decayed. A bundle of yellowing letters, in my mother’s hand. Look: here she is, smiling in her nurse’s uniform in the...

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Shall I Be Me?

In the summer of 1953, briefly in London during the Coronation celebrations, I took myself to the Phoenix theatre (Upper Circle, 6s.) to see The Sleeping Prince, with the two glittering stars of the...

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Uncle Quentin Revisited

When I was 4 my parents took me to a junk shop in Richmond. They saw me examining a musty red hardback and asked if I’d like to buy it. It was Five on Kirrin Island Again (1947), the sixth in Enid...

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Surprised by Joy

In the obituaries that appeared in 2021 for the Polish writer Adam Zagajewski, his prose, I was saddened to see, hardly got a mention. I suppose this is common with poets: their poetry is seen as the...

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A Northern Survivor

Nestled in the heart of Orkney’s second largest town, on a main street uncoiling, as the Orcadian poet and writer George Mackay Brown described it, ‘like a sailor’s rope’, Stromness Books &...

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Double Trouble

Duelling was a daily feature of my prep-school life. Our swords were wooden rulers; chipped and battered desks served as castle battle­ments. Modern warfare held a fascination too, but when it came...

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. . . from the Trees

In Issue 75, I said some books help you grow. Others help you let go. Our son was 17 when he disappeared. I’ll call him R. We bought our place that was big enough to plant trees when he was 14....

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A Recording Angel

From the long shelf of books about London that I keep (and keep adding to) the one I most cherish is The London Nobody Knows. Published sixty years ago, it is part whimsical vade mecum, part urban...

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The Thread that Binds Them

Some years ago, when writing a gardening article for an achingly right-on newspaper, I used the expression ‘other men’s flowers’. I cannot now remember in what context but I have not forgotten...

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Reaping the Whirlwind

A warm summer day in 1987. A thump on my doorstep announces the arrival of a stout parcel with the familiar return address, BOMC, Book-of-the-Month Club. These were the pre-Internet days, when BOMC...

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The Sweetest Note of All Others

Most of the houses of East Sheen in south-west London were built on farmland as part of the great explosion of suburbia between the 1890s and 1930s. The houses are solid and the rear gardens long....

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Quick Brains and Slow Tongues

My parents are both now dead. My father died last, aged 90, in 2016. I had always associated my love of books with my mother’s influence. My father’s passing, however, made me realize – too...

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A Friendly Looking Lot

When I was 6 I broke my arm and had to go to hospital to have it set in plaster of Paris. All this, both the breaking and the setting, made for an eventful day. When I got home there on the table was...

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An Olympian Scoundrel

It’s a funny thing, humour. What makes you laugh out loud may leave me with a face like an Easter Island statue. In my own experi­ence the funniest books are non-fiction, and most of these are...

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Mr Gryce Meets His Match

Imagine you are at a pub quiz. It’s the literature round and the theme is literary firsts. What was the first novel in English? What was the first detective story? Readers of Slightly Foxed could...

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Twice Upon a Time

Starting a story with ‘Once upon a time’ does not guarantee a happy ending. In their classic collection of folk tales, the rather aptly named Brothers Grimm made sure there was a moral to every...

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Cover Artist: Slightly Foxed Issue 76, John Broadley, ‘Time at the Fox Inn’

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