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
Margaret Drabble visits old New York with Edith Wharton • Daisy Hay gets political with Anthony Trollope • Jim Crumley follows Neil Gunn up-river • Miranda Seymour unearths a buried past with Georgina Harding • Anthony Wells discovers the hybrid life of Katrin FitzHerbert • Sue Gee pursues the poetry of Rosemary Tonks • Suzi Feay is introduced to Hadrian the Seventh • Martin Sorrell nearly has hysterix, and much more besides . . .
Laughter in the Library • MARTIN SORRELL
Goscinny and Uderzo’s Asterix books
A Hybrid Life • ANTHONY WELLS
Katrin FitzHerbert, True to Both My Selves
The Girl from Apex City • MARGARET DRABBLE
Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country
Waiting for Posterity • ROGER HUDSON
The Wynne Diaries
Shock Treatment • SUE GEE
The poetry of Rosemary Tonks
The River and Its Source • JIM CRUMLEY
Neil Gunn, Highland River
The Consequences of War • MIRANDA SEYMOUR
Georgina Harding’s Harvest trilogy
Sounds of the City • MARK HUDSON
Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners
Political Life • DAISY HAY
Anthony Trollope’s Palliser novels
The Man Who . . . • MARTIN EDWARDS
The crime novels of Julian Symons
Trouble at the Vatican • SUZI FEAY
Fr. Rolfe, Hadrian the Seventh
Oh Sir John! • PATRICK WELLAND
Robert Nye, Falstaff
Alone on a Wide, Wide Sea • DAVID FLEMING
Robin Knox-Johnston, A World of My Own
Out of the Shadows • ANN KENNEDY SMITH
F. M. Mayor, The Rector’s Daughter
Not Your Typical Courtier • MICHAEL BARBER
Kenneth Clark, Another Part of the Wood
Power and the Prince • DEREK PARKER
Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard
My Years as a Pony • FRANCES DONNELLY
The joy of pony books
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 77: From the Editors
There’s something very particular about the quiet months after Christmas – a time to hibernate, turn round and generally take stock. That’s what we’ve been doing here at the Slightly Foxed...
Read moreLaughter in the Library
When, on what felt like my 800th lockdown circuit of the park, I came across a fellow-walker trying his damndest to stop his dog barking at something unseen among the trees and get it on the move...
Read moreA Hybrid Life
By the time she was 14 and finally settled with her family in their own house in Totnes, Devon, Katrin FitzHerbert – or Kay Norris, as she was then – had lived in nearly thirty different places...
Read moreThe Girl from Apex City
Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country (1913) is one of the most sparkling and enjoyable novels I have ever read, and I’ve read it now several times. Each time it manages to surprise and...
Read moreWaiting for Posterity
In 1786 Richard Wynne decided to sell his estate at Folkingham in Lincolnshire and go to live on the Continent with his wife and five daughters. The sale realized £90,000 and he had investments too;...
Read moreShock Treatment
In the summer of 1971, I answered an ad in Time Out: a Hampstead couple required an evening cook. I am no cook, but I was living on very little and accordingly presented myself for interview at a...
Read moreThe River and Its Source
There are two memorials to Neil Gunn in his birthplace of Dunbeath on the Caithness coast. One is a statue and the other is a squat black typewriter. The typewriter is a mid-1930s Imperial. I have...
Read moreThe Consequences of War
A couple of years ago, a publisher sent me a pre-publication copy of a novel by Georgina Harding. I’m so glad she did for otherwise I might never have come across the work of an outstanding writer,...
Read moreSounds of the City
There are books that linger in the mind because of their stories, characters or settings. There are books of such tragic intensity you feel you’ll take certain incidents and phrases with you to the...
Read morePolitical Life
In Slightly Foxed no. 73 I wrote about the solace I found, during the first year of the pandemic, in listening to Timothy West’s brilliant recordings of Anthony Trollope’s Barchester novels. I...
Read moreThe Man Who . . .
The only fan letter I ever wrote was to Julian Symons (1912–94). A polymath – poet, editor, biographer, historian, novelist and reviewer – his non-fiction books encompassed Dickens, Carlyle,...
Read moreTrouble at the Vatican
‘How very Corvine of you,’ I purred to the witty author who had just made a remark as savage as it was exquisitely expressed. His eyes widened in surprise, then took on a gleam of approval. In an...
Read moreOh Sir John!
In 1976, a year remembered in the UK for its blazing summer, publication of a scabrous novel so inflamed a group of academics that they burned copies in the library at Reading University. Less...
Read moreAlone on a Wide, Wide Sea
Stirring tales of true-life adventure are, I suspect, most enjoyed by the unadventurous. Those of us content with a quiet and fairly uneventful life take great delight in reading books by those other...
Read moreOut of the Shadows
Take two sisters, Alice and Flora Mayor, identical twins born into a comfortable upper-middle-class family in Surrey in 1872. Their clergyman father was also a professor of classical literature at...
Read moreNot Your Typical Courtier
In 1974, following the publication that year of his ‘self-portrait’, Another Part of the Wood, I did a feature on Kenneth Clark for the BBC World Service. This involved interviewing him at his...
Read morePower and the Prince
Recently, the lack of anything worth watching on TV sent me, once again, to the DVD of Visconti’s lush 1963 film of Giuseppe Lampedusa’s The Leopard (1958). If one loves a book, the idea that a...
Read moreMy Years as a Pony
Between the ages of 8 and 11 I thought I was a pony. I was not alone: my friends were in the grip of a similar delusion. We created fantasy mounts called Daybreak or Nutmeg, then became them. We...
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