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: Tim Pears is impressed by a long Life • Olivia Potts goes back to basics • Richard Brown fights a losing battle • Frances Donnelly experiences the Feelgood factor • Roger Hudson dines with Queen Victoria • Maggie Fergusson does time • John Keay takes a round trip • George Cochrane confesses to an addiction • Martin Sorrell meets a murderer • Flora Watkins rides to hounds, and much more besides . . .
U and I and Me • GEORGE COCHRANE on Nicholson Baker, U and I: A True Story
An Unusual Case • MARTIN SORRELL on Richard Cobb, A Classical Education
Such Devoted Sisters • KATE YOUNG on Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Completely Foxed • DAVID FLEMING on David Garnett, Lady into Fox
The Man Who Stopped at Nothing • GRANT MCINTYRE on The writings of Oliver Sacks
Looking Horror in the Eye • TIM PEARS on Konstantin Paustovsky, The Story of a Life
Gone Away! • FLORA WATKINS on Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man
Boiled Beef and Icy Bedrooms • ROGER HUDSON on Memoirs of Queen Victoria’s courtiers
Cooking with Confidence • OLIVIA POTTS on Marguerite Patten, Cookery in Colour
Too Sharp for Her Own Good • CHRIS SAUNDERS on Stella Gibbons, Westwood
A Farmboy Goes to War • WILLIAM PALMER on Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage
Beyond the Safe Zone • RICHARD BROWN on Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Finding a Family • FRANCES DONNELLY on Michael Cunningham, A Home at the End of the World
At Sea with Slocum • JOHN KEAY on Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone around the World
Against the Current • ADAM SISMAN on Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety
Verse and Worse • ALASTAIR GLEGG on William S. Baring-Gould’s anthologies
Reading between the Lines • MAGGIE FERGUSSON on reading with prisoners
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 . . .
‘I enjoy reading the quarterly. It is a much-needed reminder of a gentler and simpler time.’ L. Gauvin
U and I and Me
I hadn’t read much John Updike when I picked up Nicholson Baker’s book on him during lockdown; but then neither had Baker when he wrote the book. This is one of the novelties of U and I. Where...
Read moreAn Unusual Case
Richard Cobb’s memoir A Classical Education (1985) opens on a spring day in 1950. He is at St Lazare station in Paris awaiting the arrival of an old schoolfriend he’s not seen for fourteen years....
Read moreSuch Devoted Sisters
I read Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) one summer as a teenager. It’s a work of gothic horror, and a mystery novel. More specifically, it’s a strange, haunting story...
Read moreCompletely Foxed
During late evening strolls round the quiet streets near my home I occasionally have a close encounter with a fox. We stand there, yards apart, each daring the other to move first, till finally the...
Read moreThe Man Who Stopped at Nothing
Some writers lead us into lives we’d never otherwise imagine; Michael Herr, writing on the fear and madness of war, was one; Thomas Merton on monastic seclusion, another. Oliver Sacks was one as...
Read moreLooking Horror in the Eye
My father was a country priest, a bookish intellectual hidden in a Devon valley on the edge of Dartmoor. He was something of a Russophile, and among the books that lined the walls of his study was a...
Read moreGone Away!
Can you recall the novel that took you away from the nursery bookshelves and into the realms of Grown-Up Books – a gateway book, if you like? I happened upon mine after months of resisting efforts...
Read moreBoiled Beef and Icy Bedrooms
In her long reign, stretching across eight decades, Queen Victoria had the support of a number of able and devoted courtiers. They helped her both to adapt to the alterations and accelerations during...
Read moreCooking with Confidence
The day before I sit down to write this piece, I am having lunch with my husband’s family. For pudding, Auntie Chris serves up her Christmas pudding. It is undoubtedly hers – always made to the...
Read moreToo Sharp for Her Own Good
Stella Gibbons is hardly a forgotten writer, but she wrote more forgotten works than almost anyone else. Her first book, Cold Comfort Farm (1940: see SF no.10), has a secure and well-deserved place...
Read moreA Farmboy Goes to War
One day, and only because I asked her what life had really been like in the Blitz, my mother told me not about terrifying explosions and damage and injury, but about a cold rainy day in November...
Read moreBeyond the Safe Zone
Of all the hopeless tasks I have ever set myself, perhaps the most quixotic has been my attempt to persuade undergraduate historians to read fiction. In my experience the average student is pretty...
Read moreFinding a Family
Michael Cunningham is best known for his third novel The Hours (1998), later made into an equally successful film. But it’s his second, A Home at the End of the World(1991), which I consistently...
Read moreAt Sea with Slocum
Books can be ill served by the company they keep. In my childhood home they were shelved in the only bookcase and consisted entirely of anthologies published as Reader’s Digest Condensed Books plus...
Read moreAgainst the Current
Wallace Stegner seems on the brink of being forgotten. Half a century ago he was acknowledged as a major figure in American letters; one of his novels won the Pulitzer Prize, and another the National...
Read moreVerse and Worse
If the name Baring-Gould seems vaguely familiar, perhaps you grew up as I did, exposed every Sunday to Hymns Ancient and Modern. The Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould (1834–1924) wrote many of them,...
Read moreReading between the Lines
‘The trouble with prison’, a former probation officer once told me, ‘is that nobody wants to be there’: not the prisoners, obviously, nor the staff. If that’s true, it would mean that in...
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