Slightly Foxed

Out now!

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Text says 'Gibbons sensibly realized that laughing is, for some people, braver and more radical therapy than any obtained through psycho-analysis or counselling. Many people mistakenly believe that having a laugh means that one is not taking things seriously. On the contrary There is no better way of approaching a grim and desperately serious topic, in my opinion, than by cracking a joke.' Michele Hanson – 'Poste-Freudian Therapy' on Stella Gibbons, in Slightly Foxed No.10 Summer 2006

'Many people mistakenly believe that having a laugh means that one is not taking things seriously. On the contrary There is no better way of approaching a grim and desperately serious topic, in my opinion, than by cracking a joke.' – Michele Hanson in @slightlyfoxed.bsky.social No.10

OUT NOW: Love Divine by Ysenda Maxtone Graham

With her usual consummate skill, Maxtone Graham, well-known to readers of SF, brings together the members of this small community in a light-hearted but touching story.

Find out more:

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

Love Divine by Ysenda Maxtone Graham Love Divine by Ysenda Maxtone Graham, Slightly Foxed, Foxed Quarterly, Book Review, 2025, Books Set in Small Communities, Church Life, Village Setting

Happy Publication Day! Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s book, Love Divine, comes out today with @slightlyfoxed.bsky.social If you enjoy books centred around village life that will make you laugh, and cry a bit too, then this one is for you. Find my full review of this wonderful book in the link below. ❤️

The Slightly Foxed Podcast Episode 55: At Home with The Brontës

There has never been a literary family quite like the Brontës. In our autumn podcast Ann Dinsdale, Curator of the Brontë Parsonage Museum at Haworth in Yorkshire, joined the SF team to discuss the story of the family’s life there.

Thank you for sharing this piece!

Calling East Anglia dwellers and Adrian Bell fans for this exciting forthcoming event in Halesworth!

‘In one sense, words are our masters, or communication would be impossible; in another we are the masters, or there could be no poetry.’

Roger W Holmes quoted by Robin Blake in his splendidly thought-provoking essay ’Alice in the Margins’ in the latest @slightlyfoxed.bsky.social

Read most recent edition of @slightlyfoxed.bsky.social over long weekend. As usual, my TBR (or TB located/purchased) list expanded. Any book budget overruns I blame on @nonsuchbook.bsky.social, who pointed me to Slightly Foxed several years ago.

Who am I kidding? I have no book budget.

It's a conundrum we face every quarter too! Hope you enjoyed the latest issue. 🦊📖

Thank you for sharing this snippet from our latest issue! We hope you enjoyed the rest of SF 87.

Sound advice from the cleric Sydney Smith, courtesy of Stephen Bayley in this quarter’s Slightly Foxed @slightlyfoxed.bsky.social.

The cover of the current issue of Slightly Foxed, tinted for no reason I can gather. The original is tan.

This came @slightlyfoxed.bsky.social. Two essays about books/authors I have written about elsewhere. It’s making me feel particularly refined (or something). Here’s a link to one of mine, because it’s hard to resist the urge to plug my favorite work of mine: www.irishacademicpress.ie/product/loui...

Thank you for sharing!

text says: 10th. Make no secret of your low spirits to your friends, but talk of them freely - they are always worse for dignified concealment. 9th. Attend to the effects tea and coffee produce upon you. 10th. Compare your lot with that of other people. 11th. Don't expect too much from human life - a sorry business at the best.12th. Avoid poetry, dramatic representations (except comedy), music, serious novels, melancholy, sentimental people, and everything likely to excite feeling or emotion, not ending in active benevolence. 13th. Do good, and endeavour to please everybody of every degree. 14th. Be as much as you can in the open air without fatigue.' Sydney Smith quoted by Stephen Bayley in 'Taking the Short View' in the latest Slightly Foxed - Autumn 2025

Sydney Smith on low spirits:
'Don't expect too much from human life - a sorry business at the best. Avoid...everything likely to excite feeling or emotion not ending in active benevolence.'

quoted by Stephen Bayley in 'Taking the Short View' in the latest @slightlyfoxed.bsky.social

Thank you for sharing this gorgeous photo and providing such a lovely article on Lucy M. Boston. The Green Knowe books were a much-treasured staple for many of us growing up and we are so happy to share your piece with our readers.

I’m delighted to have a piece on Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal in the latest issue of @slightlyfoxed.bsky.social.

We hope you enjoy it! Indeed, it may feel a little premature for Autumn, though we are beginning to feel that Autumnal 'back to school' feeling now that September has hit and the leaves are turning brown! Happy reading from all of us here at SF.

A fantastic piece on print publishing, featuring words from our very own founder Gail Pirkis!

Thank you for sharing! This extract is taken from Richard Smyth’s piece on Richard Bell’s Britain in Slightly Foxed Issue 86. Click the link below to view this issue of the quarterly:

foxedquarterly.com/shop/slightl...

Thank you so much for sharing! We're delighted to hear that you enjoyed it.

OUT NOW!

Episode 54 | The Many Lives of Muriel Spark ⁠

Listen here:

foxedquarterly.com/the-slightly-foxed-podcast-all-episodes

#podcast #murielspark #bookish

We were delighted to see the BB #books featured in this christening present round up curated by Madeline Silver for #TheField Magazine in some very good company!

Find out more about these charming #childrensbooks here:

foxedquarterly.com/shop/set-bb-...

#ChristeningPresents

On Friday, Slightly Foxed co-founders Gail Pirkis and Hazel Wood gave a talk about SF in St Winifred’s Church, Manaton, followed by tea in the village hall where a #book stand lay in wait. ⁠
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It was a pleasure to meet so many lovely people. ⁠We hope you had a lovely afternoon and enjoyed the talk!⁠

A pause in the day’s occupations, as Longfellow would have said. Picked up my @slightlyfoxed.bsky.social edition of Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger by Nigel Slater. Get a little thrill every time I see my personal number inked in on one of these. It’s silly. I know. But there it is.

When I came across Pamela Bright's memoir of her service as a combat nurse in WWII, Life in Our Hands, I pitched an article on it to @slightlyfoxed.bsky.social. Imagine my delight when they not only accepted but decided to reissue it as a Slightly Foxed book. +

Yesterday we had the great pleasure of teaming up with Bodies in the Bookshop to launch the Slightly Foxed summer publications. ⁠
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It was such a delight to welcome new and familiar faces to St Boltoph’s Church in Cambridge to mark issue 86 and SFE No.71: Nigel Slater’s childhood memoir Toast. ⁠

It arrived❣️
@nigelslater.bsky.social
@slightlyfoxed.bsky.social

How the World Works by Sarah Perry in Slightly Foxed Magazine Summer 2025 Text says: Though generally immune to celebrity, I found myself reduced briefly to a stammering girl as I attempted to explain what his writing had done for my mind and my spirits. It had inspired me, I said, to attempt to teach myself A-level physics, but that had been a hopeless case: I was more or less innumerate, and the maths was perpetually beyond my grasp. With the generosity so evident in the Seven Brief Lessons, Rovelli told me that though he was unable to read a musical score, he loved and understood music - he took part in it, and it enriched his life. Physics, in that case, could be to me what music was to him: an endlessly unfolding avenue of learning and wonder, and never mind the inscrutable marks on the page. There, he wrote, 'shines the mystery and the beauty of the world. And it's breathtaking. Sarah Perry Is the author of novels including Melmoth and The Essex Serpent. Her latest novel, Enlightenment, published in 2024, is about love, faith and physics.

'Rovelli told me that though he was unable to read a musical score, he loved and understood music - he took part in it, and it enriched his life. Physics could be to me what music was to him: an endlessly unfolding avenue of learning and wonder, and never mind the inscrutable marks on the page.'

Toast (No. 71) Nigel Slater, OBE, is perhaps Britain’s most treasured food writer, loved by cooks the nation over for his comfortingly do-able recipes . . .

Through the mail slot today. Toast by Nigel Slater. The latest from my Slightly Foxed Editions subscription. @slightlyfoxed.bsky.social foxedquarterly.com/shop/nigel-s...