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I have been devoted to your podcast for over a year; it could be improved only by being more frequent. Every book I have ordered from you has been a delight; nothing disappoints. I receive your emails with pleasure, and that’s saying a lot. Slightly Foxed is a source of content . . . ’
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A Calendar of Covers for 2024 | Celebrating 20 years of Slightly Foxed

A Calendar of Covers for 2024 | Celebrating 20 years of Slightly Foxed

Our special anniversary Slightly Foxed 2024 Wall Calendar is here, featuring a selection of readers’ favourite Slightly Foxed cover artwork from the past 20 years. We have just published the 80th issue of Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly and in March 2024 Slightly Foxed will be celebrating its 20th year and and we’ve decided to mark the occasion with an anniversary calendar featuring some more of the seasonal Slightly Foxed covers that readers enjoy so much. It’s a handsome, spiral-bound decorative wall calendar printed on sturdy paper with a board backing, and we feel it will raise the spirits and look good in any room. It would make a charming present for anyone who loves Slightly Foxed, or indeed for anyone who hasn’t yet come across it.
In Praise of the Bookmark

In Praise of the Bookmark

Bookmarks make antiquarians anxious: will acid in their paper eat into precious pages? Will colour bleed? The oldest survivor, made of leather, lies within the sixth-century vellum of a Coptic codex. In the nineteenth century, leather, silk or ribbon were largely used for bibles and prayer books: images arise of the solemnity of Sundays, servants and family gathered after breakfast to hear the Word. Now, in W. H. Smith, you can buy a faux-wood shark, moose or flying saucer, yours for £6.99 and guaranteed to ruin a book in no time.
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George Orwell | The Nightmare of Room 101 | From the Slightly Foxed archives

George Orwell | The Nightmare of Room 101 | From the Slightly Foxed archives

Greetings from Hoxton Square. It’s Banned Books Week and censored writers have been very much on our minds: Simone de Beauvoir, D. H. Lawrence, Voltaire, Edna O’Brien, Kurt Vonnegut, Antal Szerb, James Joyce and Radclyffe Hall, to name but a few of our favourites. We have been astonished to discover quite how many books have been banned and the myriad reasons for which they were removed from libraries and bookshops around the world.
A Modest Proposal

A Modest Proposal

Two Puffins are in front of me, picked almost at random from my bookcase. And by Puffins I mean Puffin books, represented by that cheerful little bird on the spine which was for my formative reading years pretty well a guarantee of a good read. Eusebius the Phoenician by Christopher Webb was published in Britain by Puffin in 1973, The Dancing Bear by Peter Dickinson in 1974. Both captivated me; both satisfied the story-craving in the way a good dinner settles a hungry stomach.
SF magazine subscribers only
Expressing the Inexpressible

Expressing the Inexpressible

I’m sure it is not my worst shortcoming, but it may be the one that grieves me most: I simply cannot draw. Something in this business of squinting at the world and making appropriate marks on paper eludes me. At school, I was mortified by art classes in the way that others shuddered at the thought of Games. And when I came to have my own children, their touching faith that I would be able to draw a cat or a pig or a cow could induce an almost tearful sense of inadequacy.
SF magazine subscribers only
Bore-Hunting in Dublin

Bore-Hunting in Dublin

Most fiction writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries know the form and understand that they will meet the same fate: good reviews for a first novel, a larger advance for the second, severely reduced advances for any subsequent volumes, poor sales, the casting adrift by their publishers, full-time jobs in cardboard box factories or part-time jobs in academia, then oblivion. My own fantasy, as an ageing cuckoo nesting in various universities in the early part of this century, was to find a beautiful and energetic student to front my works so that I could enjoy a new career by proxy. Perhaps not: he (or she) might have been praised for their ability to satirize the politically regrettable thought patterns of men and women of previous generations, but surely the trick would only work once. Perhaps the answer would be to dream up a suitable pen name and start afresh.
SF magazine subscribers only
The Loss of Innocence

The Loss of Innocence

I had been reading Philip Larkin’s poetry for years before, quite recently, I decided to have a look at his novels. I knew he had written a couple in his early years: Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947). I knew too that, in their Oxford days and for some while after, Larkin saw himself as primarily a novelist, while his friend Kingsley Amis regarded himself as primarily a poet (how wrong they both were). What I did not know was that, of Larkin’s novels, the second, A Girl in Winter , far from being an early misfire, is, well, a bit of a masterpiece.
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