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Slightly Foxed Issue 29
  • ISBN: 9781906562250
  • Pages: 96
  • Dimensions: 210 x 148mm
  • Illustrations: B/W
  • Publication date: 1 March 2011
  • Producer: Smith Settle
  • Cover artist: Rebecca Campbell, ‘The Foragers’, oil on linen
  • ISSN: 1742-5794
Made in Britain

Slightly Foxed Issue 29

‘An Editorial Peacock’

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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

James Hamilton-Paterson follows a spy to Cairo • Trilby Kent shares a desk with Claudine • Dennis Butts finds poetry in the Second World War • James Roose-Evans sees Europe with Augustus Hare • Kate Berridge immerses herself in the Saturday Books • Charles Elliott enters the exquisite world of a Japanese courtier • Eric Brown celebrates a science-fiction writer • Catherine Merrick salutes Charles Darwin • Michael Barber admires an elderly mischief-maker . . .


An Editorial Peacock • KATE BERRIDGE

The Saturday Books

Learn-As-You-Burn • HAZEL WOOD

P. Y. Betts, People Who Say Goodbye

The Heroism of Ordinary Life • PETER J. CONRADI

Angus Wilson, The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot; Late Call

Welcome to Dictionopolis • ROHAN CANDAPPA

Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

Coney’s Islands • ERIC BROWN

Michael G. Coney, Syzygy; The Girl with a Symphony in Her Fingers; Hello Summer, Goodbye; Brontomek!

Eminently a Victorian • JAMES ROOSE-EVANS

Augustus Hare, Peculiar People: The Story of My Life

Goodbye to Berlin • JAMES HAMILTON-PATERSON

Joseph Hone, The Private Sector

Biophilia for Beginners • CATHERINE MERRICK

Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species

A Terrifying Business • PATRICK WELLAND

Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews; Shamela

The Sound of Raindrops • CHARLES ELLIOTT

Sei Shōnagon, The Pillow Book

Scandal at School • TRILBY KENT

Colette, Claudine at School; Claudine in Paris; Claudine Married; Claudine and Annie

The Fatal Gift of Phrase • MICHAEL BARBER

Gore Vidal, United States: Essays, 1952–1992; Palimpsest

Paradise Lost • JILL FOULSTON & ELISABETH RUSSELL TAYLOR

Robin Fedden, Chantesmesle

Seeking an Oasis • DENNIS BUTTS

The Oasis Trust (ed.), Return to Oasis; From Oasis into Italy; Poems of the Second World War; More Poems of the Second World War; The Schools Oasis; The Voice of War

On the Hungarian Plain • ANTHONY GARDNER

Kate Seredy, The Good Master; The Singing Tree

Hoppy Rides Again • TOM BROWN

Clarence E. Mulford’s Westerns

Comfort and Consolation • BILL TAYLOR

On downsizing a library


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. Read more about Slightly Foxed.



Slightly Foxed Issue 29: From the Editors

‘Spring, the sweet spring . . .’ The flower shop round the corner from Slightly Foxed is full of daffodils and hyacinths now, and from our window the City spires are standing out sharply against...

Read more

An Editorial Peacock

When she is not sugar-soaping her skirting boards or throwing scrunched paper snowballs of unsatisfactory prose, Kate Berridge is writing a biographical novel based on the life of John Ruskin.

Read more

Learn-As-You-Burn

When Slightly Foxed was young, only a few issues old in fact, the writer Christopher Hawtree came to us with the story of P. Y. Betts and her childhood memoir People Who Say Goodbye. We loved the...

Read more

The Heroism of Ordinary Life

Like many 15-year-olds I dreamt of understanding myself better. I knew my background was ‘bourgeois’ and thought I was probably gay. Did this mean that I ‘fitted in’? Or not? My English...

Read more

Welcome to Dictionopolis

I’m still impressed by rainbows, and this despite knowing about light, and refraction, and the unlikelihood of the existence of pots of gold. I see a rainbow and my heart soars. And for me, if a...

Read more

Coney’s Islands

In a writing life stretching over thirty years, Michael G. Coney wrote nineteen science fiction novels and a single collection of short stories. Although his novels combined accessibility with fine...

Read more

Eminently a Victorian

‘To tell the truth,’ wrote Augustus Hare, ‘had my books not been published, had The Story of My Life, and Memorials of a Quiet Life never seen the light of day, I should have missed even the...

Read more

Goodbye to Berlin

For a year or two in the Sixties, I would regularly stop off on my way home at the W. H. Smith by Earls Court station. Catering for so many well placed commuters, it was a reliable showcase of...

Read more

Biophilia for Beginners

Until my early twenties, I had never really thought about Darwin. I was halfway through a doctorate in biology by then, so in retrospect this seems like a glaring omission. Naturally, I had thought...

Read more

A Terrifying Business

My erratic education included one year at a technical college, before it was agreed I leave on the grounds that I was incorrigibly idle. It was 1964, I was 16 and after three suffocating years at a...

Read more

Scandal at School

Among the jumble of postcards, newspaper clippings, maps and to-do lists that cram the walls around my desk is a school photograph. The occasion was the annual fair at which a group of us had...

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The Fatal Gift of Phrase

In the age of the common man, said Malcolm Muggeridge, we all want to be uncommon, and they don’t come more uncommon than Gore Vidal, a writer for whom the term sui generis might have been coined....

Read more

Hoppy Rides Again

A favourite photograph of one of my grandsons shows him astride his rocking-horse, wearing one of my old hats, a rifle and a pistol in his tiny hands and the reins between his teeth – a miniature...

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Paradise Lost

A lyrical hymn to the irrecoverable past, Robin Fedden’s memoir Chantemesle takes its title from the house in which he grew up, itself named after a tiny hamlet in the Île de France. Over the...

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Seeking an Oasis

We come to war from many different directions. My own experiences are probably similar to those of some Slightly Foxed readers: a father who survived, just, serving in the trenches in the Great War...

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On the Hungarian Plain

As a child I was always reassured by books which contained maps. The Hobbit, Treasure Island, Prince Caspian – their neatly drawn coastlines, mountains and compass points were promises of worlds...

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Comfort and Consolation

Faced with the prospect of moving into a new eco-house at the bottom of our garden I have begun to realize that I must downsize my library – which is what I like to call it: a collection of many...

Read more

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