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Slightly Foxed

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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

10/10/2025

🍂 ‘Then came October, full of merry glee.’ 🍂⁠
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– Spenser, as quoted by Edith Holden in the marvellous Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady, photographed here amongst some Foxed books.📙

08/10/2025

Ysenda Maxtone Graham | LOVE DIVINE (out 1 November) ❤️‍🔥⁠
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‘Every social situation debagged or deconstructed with such acuity and wit. I adored it.’ – Valerie Grove⁠
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It’s the first week in January, and the inhabitants of Lamley Green, a leafy village on the edge of London, are preparing to face the New Year.⁠
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At No. 12 Holly Grove however the curtains remain closed. Lucy Fanthorpe’s husband Nick, respected lawyer and stalwart of the church choir, died unexpectedly on New Year’s Day and Lucy is in bed with her head under the duvet as letters of sympathy slip through the letterbox. Laid low by grief she’s also wracked by suspicion. Nick’s behaviour before he died was strange. Was he having an affair?⁠
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Meanwhile Lamley’s parish church St Luke’s is without a resident rector, and a team of retired priests and parishioners, under the leadership of Archdeacon Martin, is keeping the show on the road during the interregnum. An advertisement has been placed in the Church Times for a ‘collaborative and caring priest, with a passion for growth, who can build and sustain a vibrant and proactive team’.⁠
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Just as the parish is in a state of flux and anxiety, so are its parishioners: grieving Lucy, Carol the lugubrious church volunteer, snobbish Elizabeth, commitment-phobic Vicki and Eliot trying to break even with their B&B, Latin master Hugh on the cusp of a solitary retirement, ruthless newcomer Chantelle who’s prepared to do anything to get her daughter into the over-subscribed church school, and Rachel the ordained sceptic who dares to speak her mind.⁠
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With her usual consummate skill, Ysenda Maxtone Graham, well-known to readers of Slightly Foxed for her hilarious and bestselling Terms & Conditions, brings together the members of this small community in a light-hearted but touching story which also points up affectionately but with deadly accuracy what’s wrong – and what’s right – with the modern C of E. Is Love Divine in the air? If so it will come in many unexpected guises.⁠
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Pre-order now | From £20 | Worldwide shipping | Out 1 November

https://foxedquarterly.com/shop/ysenda-maxtone-graham-love-divine/

03/10/2025

‘A walking, talking, breathing solid ghost. Not the ghost of someone dead. I am still alive. His flesh is my flesh, his heartbeat is my heartbeat. Because he is me. But so long ago . . .’⁠
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In Pig Ignorant (Slightly Foxed Edition No. 65), the best-selling children’s writer Nicholas Fisk lays bare his teenage soul as he comes of age in London during the Blitz.⁠
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It’s all embarrassment and uncertainty for the third-person narrator Nick (real name David Higginbottom) as he searches for an identity, from the kid who’s jeered at by bullies as a ‘Muvvers’ darling’ to the shy, gangling young adult affecting to smoke a pipe because the girl he fancies doesn’t like cigarettes.⁠
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Though Pig Ignorant is lightly written, inevitably the big subjects – s*x and death – lurk beneath the wry humour, as Nick gets his first job with a theatrical agency and finds his faltering way into Soho jazz clubs where he moonlights as a guitarist. Soon there are girls, idealized and distant in this world before the Pill, impossible to understand and s*xually dementing. ⁠
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Death comes in the form of the Blitz, the ‘clamped-down dark of the blackout’, the night when the family home is nearly hit, and the day when Nick sees the ghastly dust-whitened face of an elderly man whose torso is pulled out of the rubble. Pig Ignorant ends with another rite-of-passage, Nick’s call-up into RAF. It’s a brilliant book, the story not only of the making of a man but also of the making of a writer.⁠
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Hand-numbered clothbound copies available from £20 | Worldwide shipping

https://foxedquarterly.com/shop/nicholas-fisk-pig-ignorant/

02/10/2025

Lucy Boston’s The Children of Green Knowe (1954) is one of the most
enchanting children’s books ever written.

The time is unspecified, but it would seem to be after the war, when trains still stopped at little stations like the one called Penny Soaky. It’s not long before Christmas and there will be snow. It is also a time when a little boy like Tolly, who is 7, can travel on a train to his unknown great-grandmother all by himself.

The place: who knows, but there are floods all around and when Tolly arrives, the taxi driver can only go so far before the waters cover the road, and an old man called Boggis comes to fetch Tolly in a rowing boat with a lantern on the end because it’s dark. Eventually they reach Green Knowe, a house now surrounded by water and which is the most wonderful house imaginable. It is where Tolly’s family have lived for generations and where he fits like a nut inside its shell.

There is magic in the place; when he enters, he sees little wooden cherubs in the hall holding branches that miraculously sprout scented blossoms at the ends, even in winter. So we have the ideal scenario: an almost orphan boy (Tolly’s mother is dead and his father has remarried and lives in Burma) and a great-grandmother in a black velvet frock who recognizes him as one of the family and who is so bent by age that her face is almost on a level with his own. The story, then, meets the essential needs of a child: independence, security and a place of safety, home.

– Melanie McDonagh on The Children of Green Knowe in Slightly Foxed issue 87.

Single issues from £14 | Subscriptions from £56 | Worldwide shipping

https://foxedquarterly.com/shop/lucy-m-boston-the-children-of-green-knowe/

29/09/2025

To look into The Annotated Alice is quite an addictive experience. You soon forget any business at hand and become absorbed not just in Carroll’s beguiling texts but in Gardner’s heroic efforts to pin them down: the violent confusions of Wonderland, the inverted landscape of the Looking-Glass, the Snark hunt’s choppy seas.

There is much additional information too. Would you like to read the French translation of ‘Jabberwocky’ (‘Il brilgue: les töves lubricilleux . . .’) or the German one (‘Es brillig war. Die schlichte Toven . . .’)? Look no further. Or the missing ‘wasp in a wig’ episode, which Carroll left out on the insistence of his illustrator John Tenniel (‘I can’t see my way to a picture’)? . . .

Alice must repeatedly negotiate between sense and nonsense, except that there really is no negotiation. She is in a fight in which sense is pummelled, shaken, dissected, distorted and scrutinized from every point of view. In literary terms, the products of this are parody, satire, wordplay, chop logic, jokes and puns, all worrying at Victorian culture, whether in the nursery or an Oxford college’s Senior Common Room.

– Robin Blake on The Annotated Alice in Slightly Foxed issue 87.

25/09/2025

‘I first came across Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives (1983) a decade after it was published, thanks to a mention in a footnote of a now-forgotten book. I liked the sound of a study of five Victorian marriages and promptly ordered a copy. I have that (paperback) copy still, though later I ordered another (hardback), on the principle that when you find something really good – a perfect pair of jeans for example – it’s often worth buying two.’

– Kate Hubbard on Phyllis Rose, Parallel Lives in Slightly Foxed issue 87, Autumn 2025.

Single issues from £14 | Worldwide shipping

https://foxedquarterly.com/shop/slightly-foxed-issue-87-published-1-september-2025/

23/09/2025

‘In one of those late warm September dusks I stood outside, listening. Two church bells sounded from the next parish, not exactly pealing, more as if talking to each other. Two cows were calling, with occasional paroxysms of double-stopping: there were voices in the distance of men still at some task, and a robin close at hand scattering a few wistful notes. A third bell broke in on the other two, the cows blared in unison, a waft of breeze clapped poplar leaves like faint hands.’⁠
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– From A Countryman’s Autumn Notebook by Adrian Bell, complied by Richard Hawking ⁠ 🍂⁠
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In the last decades of Bell’s life, when he produced his weekly Notebook, he recorded with a farmer’s keen eye the many changes that were taking place around him, but his writing, though poetic, is not nostalgic or sentimental. He is not simply lamenting what has disappeared from rural life but considering what can be learnt from the process. He saw that farming was gradually being reduced to running a ‘factory with the roof off’ and wrote passionately of the need to farm for the long-term benefit of the land – a call that seems even more pressing today.⁠
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From £20 | Worldwide shipping⁠

https://foxedquarterly.com/shop/adrian-bell-a-countrymans-autumn-notebook/

22/09/2025

‘George Bowling is the narrator of George Orwell’s delightfully pessimistic Coming Up for Air (1939). Bowling is a victim of a succession of disappointments just like mine – the tiny catastrophes of ageing – all in the shadow of a catastrophe that was not tiny: Orwell wrote Coming Up for Air between September 1938 and March 1939, on the eve of war, while convalescing near Marrakesh. With global conflict seemingly unavoidable and desperately missing his comparatively idyllic childhood in south Oxfordshire, it is perhaps no surprise that he chose a plot that centred on nostalgia and ⁠disappointed hopes .⁠ . .’ ⁠
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– Samuel Saloway-Cooke on George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air⁠ in Slightly Foxed issue 87

https://foxedquarterly.com/shop/slightly-foxed-issue-87-published-1-september-2025/

19/09/2025

‘This is the best kind of historical fiction, far too good to be limited to children’s bookshelves.’ – Sue Gaisford on Rosemary Sutcliff in Slightly Foxed Issue 63⁠
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Sutcliff was writing primarily for children, but she never talks down to her readers, and adults too find these novels impossible to put down. ⁠
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All of them are based on historical fact but it’s Sutcliff’s imaginative brilliance that makes you smell the burning cherry log warming old Uncle Aquila’s cosy study, feel the tension in the air at the Saturnalia Games, and shiver in the icy winds howling round the bleak frontier forts along Hadrian’s Wall. ⁠
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Her protagonists are no cardboard cut-outs but flesh-and-blood people with understandable weaknesses and beset by recognizable human dilemmas, and it’s they who drive the plots. As well as being brilliant reads, together these novels make sense of a far-off period that left its mark on almost every aspect of British life. ⁠
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They had been difficult to find for some time and we’re delighted to have reissued all seven of the Roman and post-Roman novels, with their original illustrations, in a limited, numbered editions.⁠
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https://foxedquarterly.com/products/rosemary-sutcliff-classic-childrens-books/
🍂📚️

18/09/2025

‘All the months are crude experiments out of which the perfect September is made.’ – Virginia Woolf

For all your autumnal reading inspiration needs, visit the link in bio to view The Slightly Foxed Readers’ Catalogue, Autumn 2025. Everything listed here can be sent to you or directly to a recipient in good time for a date of your choice. Happy browsing. 🍂📖

17/09/2025

‘Joy and dread alike course through the poem’s veins.’ | ‘Autumn Journal is arguably [Louis MacNeice’s] creative apex. Written with his characteristically poignant joie de vivre, it takes the measure of his life to date with melancholic wit and candour, while wrestling with what the terrors of totalitarianism and an inevitable war will mean both for him personally and for the world he knows. Joy and dread alike course through the poem’s veins . . . ’

– Matthew Lyons on Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal in Slightly Foxed issue 87 (Autumn 2025) 🍂

15/09/2025

To write this book I must send myself back through the years. My self is rather reluctant to take the journey. It would rather keep with me in this little house at Newstead, savouring the present.

The September morning is lovely. I sit at my table, looking through the open door, urging my self to leave.

‘Go,’ I say to it. ‘Go back.’

It complains. It is comfortable where it is. But I am stern.

‘You must start,’ I say.

The elderberries hang in dark clots on the bushes at the edge of the wood opposite. I think of making elderberry wine. I probably shan’t make it, but I like to think of making it. One gets a good deal of pleasure in thinking of what one might do – more than in doing it – and I do not deny myself this.

I disengage my thoughts from the elderberries and look to see how far my self has gone. Not far. It is still hanging about near this end.

‘Go along,’ I urge it. ‘Go back.’ . . .

– The opening of The Other Day, where author Dorothy Whipple (championed by ) does indeed go back and write a beautiful account of growing up at the turn of the century.

The Other Day is available as a hand-numbered Slightly Foxed Edition.

From £20 | Worldwide shipping

https://foxedquarterly.com/shop/dorothy-whipple-other-day/

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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.