‘First of all I must tell you how much I have enjoyed my copy of the Spring edition.  As a new reader I am delighted to have discovered you!’ D.B.W.

You have the very happy knack of dropping a book through my letter-box just when I am casting about for what to read next. Yesterday evening I finished P.D. James’s Children of Men; this evening I shall read A House in Flanders.’ D.J.

‘Thank you for all the back numbers and slipcases – all arrived safely. I’m like a mouse in a cheese shop – everything is so delicious that I cannot believe the heaven I’m in! So hard to pace my reading and not read ALL in one day! I’m thrilled to have every wonderful volume – THANK YOU’  W.H.

‘A House in Flanders will definitely be my book of 2010 . . .  The book is so evocative . . . Please keep up the good work finding such books. I will wait keenly for the next edition.’ D.A.

A House in Flanders, his account of those summer months spent on the edge of the Flanders Plain, does indeed have a hypnotic and dreamlike quality. The dignified old French country house with its unvarying routines; the extended family of elderly aunts, uncles and grown-up cousins (with one of whom he fell boyishly in love); the summer warmth and wide Flemish skies were like an awakening to a young boy whose home in England was a ‘cold and empty place’ and whose parents, he felt, ‘preferred frigid intellectual exchanges to the more complicated and demanding world of personal relationships’.

Yet all was not as golden as at first seemed. The German occupation had left its mark, and in 1951 memories of it were still raw and painful. Gradually, through his vivid portraits of the various members – in particular of the firm but kindly matriarch Tante Yvonne – Michael Jenkins teases out the history of the family and of the surrounding area and uncovers the secret at the heart of the book – the reason he has been sent there.

As Dirk Bogarde wrote in the Daily Telegraph when A House in Flanders was first published, this is ‘a radiant book, a whole spectrum of colours and lights, of delights and elegances, of wistfulness and love’.

Now it’s no more parties for the time being and all hands to the deck to get gift-wrapped copies of the Winter issue, books and back issues off in time for Christmas. We’ve got quite a production line of ribbon-tying, parcel-wrapping, card-writing, envelope-stuffing and posting (not to mention dog-walking and tea-making) on the go.

We’re also having fun planning the shop’s New Year facelift and have been thrilled to hear nice things about both the shop and SF from the literary world.

Robert McCrum in the Guardian

Boyd Tonkin in the Independent

 ‘It’s a joy, a delight, a quarterly treat that drives me to the bookshelves, the bookshop or the library in search of forgotten or never-encountered pleasures. I won’t say that Slightly Foxed is essential, it’s just that I can’t live without it any more.’ Bernard Cornwell

 ‘It’s always a red-letter day when the post includes Slightly Foxed – gorgeous new cover, choice list of contents. I always find one title I plan to read – or an old favourite I’d forgotten about.’ Penelope Lively

 ‘For all “real readers” it’s exciting to open a new issue of Slightly Foxed, sure of meeting a kindred spirit in each little essay. This quarterly deserves its own space in the bookcase; later generations can quote from it to prove that good writing didn’t die with the twentieth century.’ Dervla Murphy

 ‘Sometimes deep, sometimes surprising, often eccentric, but always unputdownable.’ Posy Simmonds

 ‘A quarterly box of delights – always something unexpected to excite the taste buds of the bookish. I know it’s planned, but it feels fortuitous and that’s quite an art.’ Paul Routledge

Bell’s father had been withering about his son’s literary ambitions but agreed to let him learn agriculture and sent him as a paying guest to a farming family in a village near Bury St Edmunds. ‘I was flying from the threat of an office life,’ Bell writes on the first page of the book. Yet when he arrived one autumn day on an old motorbike he felt all wrong for the part – too much of a ‘gent’ with his weak hands, his boots which were unlike anyone else’s, and his inability to understand the Suffolk dialect. Like many townies, he assumed at first that the yokels were somewhat simple, but soon his own ignorance of the countryside and initial inability to do the most basic physical tasks taught him a new respect. A farmer, he discovered, stored away in his head thousands of facts about animals, crops and fodder, while his eye for a pig was ‘as subtle as an artist’s’. Bell’s eye was subtle too. He grew to love the land, and Corduroy is filled with the most precise yet poetic descriptions of the countryside and of farming life. It was a book, his son the former MP Martin Bell tells us, that many soldiers from the villages of England took with them in their kitbags to the war zones of the Second World War to remind them of the world of peace and sanity they had left behind. For Corduroy is not simply a period piece – it captures what is unchanging about the lives of those who live from, rather than simply on, the land.