Smith Settle Printing & Booking-Binding Ltd

02/06/2026

02/06/2026

15/04/2026

When I moved on to the boat, my life having fallen apart, three people within one week asked if I’d read Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore. The third was Penelope’s great-granddaughter Heather, whom I’d met by chance. I was running, then, on fate, chance, a sure conviction that things would work out if I followed the signs, and I saw threefold occurrences as particularly indicative of providence. I went to Blackwell’s and bought the book.

In its first pages, Fitzgerald describes the barge-dwellers moored along the tidal Thames by Battersea and Chelsea, whose ‘certain failure, distressing to themselves, to be like other people, caused them to sink back, with so much else that drifted or was washed up, into the mud moorings of the great tideway’. My boat’s owner, having driven up from London to clear out engine parts, miscellaneous metal implements and years of dust and spider corpses, had said something similar to me: ‘People roll downhill and the river catches them.’ Few end up on the river when their lives are going well . . .

– Rose Lyddon writes about life on a boat and Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel Offshore in Slightly Foxed issue 89

https://foxedquarterly.com/shop/slightly-foxed-issue-89/

15/04/2026

04/04/2026

‘Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise has always felt like home . . . 🌷🏡📖

A romantic notion, perhaps, from someone brought up in the 1970s and ’80s, rather than a century ago, as Flora was. I first read it when I was 13, then again in my twenties, and once more recently, this time as a mother, looking back on my own childhood but also on that of my children, as the oldest two began to make their way into the world, away from the rural hamlet and tenanted ex-farmworker’s cottage they’ve grown up in. With the passing of time that feeling of homecoming has only grown stronger.’

– Nicola Chester on Lark Rise by Flora Thompson, which is available as a hand-numbered Slightly Foxed Edition.

From £20 | Worldwide shipping

https://foxedquarterly.com/shop/flora-thompson-lark-rise/

31/03/2026

‘Chatwin catches perfectly the collective temperament of a community where Welsh and English traditions mingle to produce a border culture . . . It might be thought that On the Black Hill is an exception to Chatwin’s pattern of writing about the exotic and the faraway. But in basing his story in a location where there is a complex ‘borderland’ culture, and in telling the life-story of two old men who together turn away from the modern age, he is in fact examining the theme of restlessness: the thwarted instinct to get away in the case of Lewis; the fearful response in the case of Benjamin.’ ⁠
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– Andrew Joynes on Bruce Chatwin’s On the Black Hill in Slightly Foxed issue 89.⁠
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Click the link in bio to view the latest issue of Slightly Foxed. ⁠
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Single issues from £14 | Worldwide shipping

31/03/2026

28/03/2026

Beautiful books Slightly Foxed 📚