Slightly Foxed

Slightly Foxed Slightly Foxed is the beautifully produced magazine for people who love books. Worldwide shipping from London.

We also have an acclaimed list of memoirs, children's books, a popular literary podcast, and more. ‘The business of reading should please the hand and eye as well as the brain, and Slightly Foxed editions – books or quarterly – are elegant creations. Content follows form, offering new discoveries and old favourites to curious and discriminating readers.’ Hilary Mantel

‘I have written a book which gives me much pleasure.’ – John MooreGood afternoon from a sweltering Hoxton Square. This w...
15/08/2025

‘I have written a book which gives me much pleasure.’ – John Moore

Good afternoon from a sweltering Hoxton Square. This week has been one of the hottest of the summer yet. We’ve had the fans on full blast – which has admittedly caused some difficulty with paperwork flying around the office – and have been basking in the sunshine over lunch breaks. On these hot summer days, the last place we want to be is in the city, and we’ve all been yearning after the British countryside. What better, then, to escape into the writing of John Moore, who Harold Nicolson named ‘one of our best writers on the English countryside’.

Read the full newsletter here:

https://foxedquarterly.com/category/newsletters/

Helene Hanff’s letter to Frank at Marks & Co., 84, Charing Cross Road on this day in 1959: sir: i write to say i have go...
15/08/2025

Helene Hanff’s letter to Frank at Marks & Co., 84, Charing Cross Road on this day in 1959:

sir:

i write to say i have got work.

i won it. i won a $5,000 Grant-in-Aid off CBS, it’s supposed to support me for a year while I write American History dramatizations. I am starting with a script about New York under seven years of British Occupation and i MARVEL at how i rise above it to address you in friendly and forgiving fashion, your behavior over here from 1776 to 1783 was simply FILTHY.

Is there such a thing as a modern-English version of the Canterbury Tales? I have these guilts about never having read Chaucer but I was talked out of learning Early Anglo-Saxon/Middle English by a friend who had to take it for her P.h.D. They told her to write an essay in Early Anglo-Saxon on any-subject-of-her-own-choosing. ‘Which is all very well,’ she said bitterly, ‘but the only essay subject you can find enough Early Anglo-Saxon words for is “How to Slaughter a Thousand Men in a Mead Hall”.’

She also filled me in on Beowulf and his illegitimate son Sidwith – or is it Widsith? she says it’s not worth reading so that killed my interest in the entire subject, just send me a modern Chaucer.

love to nora.

hh

https://foxedquarterly.com/shop/helene-hanff-84-charing-cross-road-plain-foxed-edition/

‘Summer afternoon - summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English Language....
13/08/2025

‘Summer afternoon - summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English Language.’ – Henry James ☀️

Click the link below to view The Slightly Foxed Summer 2025 Readers’ Catalogue for some seasonal reading recommendations, all available to buy from the Slightly Foxed online shop.

https://foxedquarterly.com/readers-catalogue/all-books

The wisdom-loving philosophers of Ancient Greece made a case for carving out leisure time, while the anchorite Julian of...
12/08/2025

The wisdom-loving philosophers of Ancient Greece made a case for carving out leisure time, while the anchorite Julian of Norwich favoured a life of seclusion in which ‘all shall be well’. At the age of thirty-eight Michel de Montaigne retired to a grand book-filled chateau to test out ideas in essays, while George Orwell wrote book reviews in hungover misery. Izaak Walton found contemplation in The Compleat Angler and Jerome K. Jerome found humour in Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, while the autodidactic Mitford sisters sought wild freedom.

In the spirit of Plato’s Symposium, the Slightly Foxed team enter into lively dialogue with two distinguished magazine editors, Tom Hodgkinson of the Idler and Harry Mount of the Oldie, and learn lessons from notable loafers in literature. We begin with Doctor Johnson, an icon of indolence who wrote an essay called ‘The Idler’ and liked time to ponder; this lazy lexicographer claimed his dictionary would take three years to write when in fact it would take nine . .

We enjoy a leisurely spell with loungers in fiction, visiting Lady Bertram and her pug in Mansfield Park, taking to Lady Diana Cooper’s bed in A Handful of Dust, retreating to Aunt Ada Doom’s room in Cold Comfort Farm, settling into the quiet comfort of Mycroft Holmes’s Diogenes Club and meeting Thomas Love Peacock’s Honourable Mr Listless along the way. And, to finish, there are the usual wide-ranging reading recommendations for when you have an idle moment.

Catch up with Episode 39: Idle Moments: Literary Loafers through the Ages and Pages podcast via your usual streaming platform or the link below:

https://foxedquarterly.com/idle-moments-literary-loafers-through-ages-slightly-foxed-podcast-episode-39/

The paperback runs to fewer than one hundred pages and wouldn’t trouble the pocket of a silk frock; but it contains the ...
11/08/2025

The paperback runs to fewer than one hundred pages and wouldn’t trouble the pocket of a silk frock; but it contains the universe, and everything in it.

The key principles of post-Newtonian physics are explored with the rigour of a scholar and the questing wisdom of a philosopher. The first lesson is entitled ‘The Most Beautiful of Theories’ and explores the ‘absolute masterpiece’ of the General Theory of Relativity with such clarity and precision that within four pages I persuaded myself that I understood all that Einstein had conceived (within six pages, of course, I knew I did not) . . .

Sarah Perry recommends Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli in Slightly Foxed Issue 86.

Click the link in bio to view this issue of Slightly Foxed

Greetings from Hoxton Square where we are delighted to have just received the delivery of issues and books for the forth...
08/08/2025

Greetings from Hoxton Square where we are delighted to have just received the delivery of issues and books for the forthcoming autumn quarter. We’re very excited to release Issue 87 (Autumn 2025), Slightly Foxed Edition No. 72 First Light and the new Plain Foxed Edition of the much-loved Cider with Rosie. Copies are available to pre-order now.

Hauling box after box of books up the stairs is hungry work and after setting down the final parcel the office foxes flocked to the kitchen to retrieve, heat or prepare their respective lunches. The kitchen at Foxed HQ gets a lot of use over lunch break. When 1pm hits, the four of us head over to dice up vegetables, descend upon the hobs or wait eagerly by the oven.

On Shrove Tuesday we cooked pancakes; one cold February afternoon Rebecca made us warming cups of chai in a saucepan; and this summer we’ve been putting together plenty of iced elderflower drinks with mint and lemon to keep cool. On the day we dispatched the Slightly Foxed Edition of Nigel Slater’s Toast we celebrated by trying a Fray Bentos Steak & Kidney Pie – one of the many dishes he writes about in his iconic memoir. Our collective review was similar to those expressed by a young Nigel: ‘The filling smells like the food we put out for the dog, though in all fairness it tastes a whole lot better.’

https://foxedquarterly.com/category/newsletters/

Toast is available as a hand-numbered Slightly Foxed Edition.

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I like a neat knicker drawer as much as the next neurotic . . . || Millet-Robinet peppers and salts, garlics and stuffs ...
07/08/2025

I like a neat knicker drawer as much as the next neurotic . . . || Millet-Robinet peppers and salts, garlics and stuffs her book with advice, not just about how to make one’s home a pleasant place to live in, but about how to live pleasantly in it . . . really, it is a treatise on eating, resting, entertaining and taking pleasure and pride in one’s rooms and possessions . . .

This is where Millet-Robinet differs from modern ‘cleanfluencers’. The dastardly Instagram algorithm, knowing I will watch videos about grout mould, feeds me reel after reel of household ‘hacks’ – what used to be known as ‘tips’ – demonstrated by women whose greatest joy appears to be scrubbing U-bends or folding knickers into rectangles so crisp they stand up on their own.

Now, I like a neat knicker drawer as much as the next neurotic, but I also recognize the sheer Sisyphean tedium of cooking, cleaning, laundering and hosing the toddler down after tea. Having polished the sitting-room floorboards with one of my husband’s old socks and a pot of Cambridge beeswax, I want to sit on the sofa with a novel, occasionally looking up to admire my handiwork, not go on polishing till the end of time.

– Laura Freeman recommends The French Country Housewife in Slightly Foxed Issue 86.

Laura Freeman is chief art critic of The Times and author of Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists. She has been known to clean the skirting boards with an old toothbrush.

https://foxedquarterly.com/shop/slightly-foxed-issue-86-published-1-june-2025/

‘Old memories are strange in the sense that one never can be sure how true they are. The most vivid of them are probably...
05/08/2025

‘Old memories are strange in the sense that one never can be sure how true they are. The most vivid of them are probably fairly accurate, even allowing for time and nostalgia to make the inevitable changes. Half and quarter memories are a different matter. What truth is there in them? Some may be quite fictitious but believed in just the same.’

– Edward Ardizzone in his beautifully illustrated childhood memoir The Young Ardizzone

There can be few author-illustrators whose books are remembered – and still read – with such affection as those of Edward Ardizzone. And affection is the keynote of this charming memoir, The Young Ardizzone, which brings alive in words and pictures the comfortable Edwardian world in which Ardizzone grew up.

The author of the ever-popular Little Tim and Lucy books (and illustrator of many more) begins his story in 1905, when he was 5 and his mother brought him and his two sisters home to England from Haiphong, where his father was a telegraph engineer. Having settled them in the remote Suffolk village of East Bergholt she returned to the Far East for three years, leaving them in the care of their maternal grandmother,­ a much-loved but somewhat alarming figure whose sudden inexplicable outbursts of temper could turn her face almost literally black with rage.

Thereafter, like many colonial children, the young Ardizzones led a somewhat peripatetic existence, punctuated by visits from their mother – once with a surprise new brother and sister in tow. But they grew up with a full complement of cheerful young bachelor uncles, great aunts and eccentric family friends – all beautifully and often poignantly captured in Ardizzone’s deceptively simple prose and delicately humorous drawings.

This book is a must for fans of Ardizzone, young and old, and a perfect introduction for those who haven’t yet discovered him.

From £20 | Worldwide shipping

https://foxedquarterly.com/shop/edward-ardizzone-the-young-ardizzone-plain-foxed-edition/

In Richard Bell’s Britain he writes drily of ‘the black scum on the bricks and sandstone’ of his Wakefield home, ‘repres...
04/08/2025

In Richard Bell’s Britain he writes drily of ‘the black scum on the bricks and sandstone’ of his Wakefield home, ‘representing 100 years of progress’. In the Weald he draws vast industrial vehicles crashing into woodland, ‘a perfect symbol of the relentless momentum of an economy greedy for energy’.

‘Every part of the country I visited’, he observes in a postscript, ‘had some kind of threat hanging over it. I saw hedges being grubbed up, oil pollution on beaches . . . On balance Britain is becoming less green and pleasant.’

And yet there is always, always, something to see, something to write about, something to draw. Bell – who learnt his birds and bot any amid the grimy post-industrial landscapes of West Yorkshire – is always open to beauty.

– Richard Smyth on Richard Bell’s Britain in Slightly Foxed issue 86 (Summer 2025).

Click the link in bio to view this issue of Slightly Foxed.

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Greetings from Foxed HQ where some changes are under way . . .Last week was Izzy’s final week as Operations Manager at S...
01/08/2025

Greetings from Foxed HQ where some changes are under way . . .

Last week was Izzy’s final week as Operations Manager at Slightly Foxed. We’re very sorry to see her go and will miss her calm presence and sense of humour in the office. We wish her every triumph in her new job! Rebecca will be filling Izzy’s shoes as Operations Manager. Meanwhile, Isabel will become Publicity and Marketing Coordinator and Edie will take on a full-time role as Subscriptions Administrator and Packing Assistant. We are also excited to welcome Ruth, our new part-time Packing Assistant, to the team.

With Izzy’s departure and London summer in full swing, we’ve had abundant excuses for post-work drinks in the square, helped along by British winemakers Radlow Hundred, who kindly sent us a few bottles to celebrate our brand new partnership with them. It seemed only appropriate, therefore, to share an extract from The Wine Lover’s Daughter this week.

The Wine Lover’s Daughter began life as an idea for an article pitched by celebrated American author, editor and essayist Anne Fadiman (Ex Libris) to Harper’s magazine. ‘I think I could tell the story of my father’s life and character through wine,’ she proposed. The article never materialized but the idea took root and, thankfully, Anne decided to write this memoir.

The Wine Lover’s Daughter is a minor classic, one which will resonate with fathers and daughters, book-lovers and wine-lovers, everywhere.

To view the full newsletter where you can read the extract and find out more about our new partnership to benefit those subscribers who enjoy a tipple or two please click the link below.

https://mailchi.mp/foxedquarterly/the-wine-lovers-daughter-radlow-hundred-from-the-slightly-foxed-archives

‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be,’ my grandfather used to say gravely. His caution wasn’t about money. It was about b...
31/07/2025

‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be,’ my grandfather used to say gravely. His caution wasn’t about money. It was about books.

Do not lend a book you will want back and do not borrow one you will be sorry to return. Sound advice. Not that I’ve kept to it. Some books I am willing to relinquish. That makes space on my heaving shelves. The loss of others I mourn.

I lent my copy of Barbara Hepworth’s A Pictorial Autobiography to an illustrator friend who, for reasons of distance and diaries, I rarely see. We had been talking about children and creativity and whether one must necessarily restrict the other: the easel, the laptop, the pram in the hall. I said she must read Hepworth and posted her my copy. It arrived. She thanked me.

After that: nothing. Nothing for months and months and a year, and for months after that. I nursed a perverse and very British grievance. I couldn’t possibly ask for it back, because that would be rude. Instead, I did the proper and polite thing of raining resentment, curses and hellfire on her head every time my eye caught the gap in the bookcase.

As the second anniversary of the lending approached, I shrugged, shuffled the shelf and wrote the book off as a loss. Then, in the way of watched pots never boiling, the book came back with a handpainted card and a note. She was sorry she’d kept it, but she’d wanted to read it again and again . . .

– Laura Freeman on the dangers of lending books in Slightly Foxed issue 69 (pictured).

Click the link below to view this issue of Slightly Foxed. All issues are kept permanently in print.

https://foxedquarterly.com/shop/slightly-foxed-issue-69-published-1-mar-2021/

‘The books feel so incredibly lovely in my hands it is a pleasure just to hold . . . Thank you for making them so beauti...
29/07/2025

‘The books feel so incredibly lovely in my hands it is a pleasure just to hold . . . Thank you for making them so beautiful and affordable. Cheers to you all, from a very satisfied book recipient and podcast fan.’ – Foxed Reader

Bound in duck-egg blue cloth, with a silk ribbon marker, the Plain Foxed Editions come in the same neat pocket format as the original SF Editions and will happily fill any gaps in your collection, as well as forming a delightful uniform series of their own.

Catch up with a set of twenty of our available Plain Foxed Editions. This literary bundle includes:

Edward Ardizzone, The Young Ardizzone
Adrian Bell, Corduroy
Christabel Bielenberg, The Past is Myself
Ysenda Maxtone Graham, Mr Tibbits’s Catholic School
Ysenda Maxtone Graham, Terms & Conditions
Graham Greene, A Sort of Life
John Hackett, I Was a Stranger
Diana Holman-Hunt, My Grandmothers and I
Richard Kennedy, A Boy at the Hogarth Press & A Parcel of Time
Hilary Mantel, Giving up the Ghost
James Lees-Milne, Another Self
John Moore, Portrait of Elmbury
Gwen Raverat, Period Piece
Anthony Rhodes, Sword of Bone
Dodie Smith, Look Back with Love
Rosemary Sutcliff, Blue Remembered Hills
Hermione, Countess of Ranfurly, To War with Whitaker
Helene Hanff, 84, Charing Cross Road
Michael Jenkins, A House in Flanders
Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie (1 Sept)

Click the link below to view the available Plain Foxed Editions on the Slightly Foxed website.

Buy any four Plain Foxed Editions and save £1 per edition.

https://foxedquarterly.com/products/plain-foxed-editions/

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The Story of Slightly Foxed

Each quarter it offers 96 pages of lively personal recommendations for books of lasting interest – books, including fiction, non-fiction and poetry, that have stood the test of time and have left their mark on the people who write about them. It’s an eclectic mix, and our contributors are an eclectic bunch too. Some of them are names you’ll have heard of, some not, but all write thoughtfully and amusingly.

Some recent and coming attractions: Anthony Wells goes in search of Proust • Margaret Drabble sees Irelandthrough Trollope’s eyes • Maggie Fergusson meets Colin Thubron • Michael Holroyd enjoys the biography of an extraordinary biographer • Ann KennedySmith meets E. M. Forster’s great-aunt • Sue Gee is drawn by E. H. Shepard •Adam Foulds discovers England with Geoffrey Hill • Laura Freeman discovers the tragedy behind the work of A. A. Milne • Peter Parker enjoys a taste of life in Victorian Shoreditch • Brandon Robshaw introduces the real George Orwell •Ariane Bankes explores Trieste with Jan Morris, and much, much more . . .

Our readers enjoy the way Slightly Foxed opens up unexpected new horizons and they love the way it looks and feels – delightfully illustrated, printed on elegant cream paper, and just the right size to read in bed. They love our series of Slightly Foxed Editions and Cubs too – beautifully produced hardback reprints of classic memoirs and children’s books that have been allowed to slip out of print, each available from us in a limited cloth-bound edition of 2,000 copies. So whether you’re in search of stimulation, consolation or diversion, a treat for yourself or a present for a bookish friend or relative, you might do worse than take out a subscription to Slightly Foxed this year. If you do, you’ll be in excellent company.