stockists’ catalogue summer 2017

‘Hurrah for Slightly Foxed – a truly independent small publishing house that flourishes while eschewing the lure of Amazon’ Arabella Friesen, John Sandoe Books Contents

Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly 3 Eclectic, elegant and entertaining, Slightly Foxed is more like a well-read friend than a literary review . . .

Slightly Foxed Editions 4 These classic memoirs, each published in a limited and numbered hardback pocket edition . . .

Plain Foxed Editions 8 These sturdy little books, bound in duck-egg blue cloth, come in the same neat pocket format as the original SFEs . . .

Slightly Foxed Paperbacks 9 Delightful to look at, pocket-sized, easy to handle and elegantly produced . . .

Slightly Foxed Cubs 11 Slightly Foxed Cubs is a series of reissues of classic children’s books which strike a nostalgic chord . . .

Bookshop of the Quarter 16 Situated in the seaside town of Aldeburgh, this handsome red bookshop looks out over the North Sea . . .

• Ordering No minimum order. To order from this catalogue, contact Anna Kirk • UK 020 7033 0258 Overseas +44 20 7033 0258 • Email: [email protected]

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Slightly Foxed Ltd 53 Hoxton Square London N1 6PB www.foxedquarterly.com The Real Reader’s Quarterly

Eclectic, elegant and entertaining, Slightly Foxed is more like a well-read friend than a literary review magazine. Each quarter it offers96 pages of lively personal recommendations for books of lasting interest – books, both fiction and non-fiction, that have stood the test of time and have left their mark on the people who write about them. All 54 issues are available. £11 per issue.

Issue 54, Summer 2017, ‘An Unlikely Duo’ Publication Date: 1 June 2017 • Cover Price: £11

ISSN: 1742-5974 / ISBN: 978-1-910898-02-4 96pp • 148 x 210mm • Sewn paperback magazine Full colour cover • Black & white illustrations throughout

Ysenda Maxtone Graham joins an unlikely couple on the road to Kashgar • Constantine Fraser discovers Old Salonika in a cookbook • Maggie Fergusson discusses writing and serendipity with Ali Smith • Ken Haigh snatches a quiet moment on the river bank • Frost in May gives Melissa Harrison the shivers • Colin Williams digs in on Watership Down • Cecily Blench uncovers her grandmother’s Indian past • Nigel Jarrett scratches his head over The Elements of Style • Elisabeth Russell Taylor is invigorated by The Wild Irish Girl . . .

• Cecily Blench on Angela Bolton, The Maturing Sun • Maggie Fergusson interviews Ali Smith • Constantine Fraser on Eden & Stavroulakis, Salonika: A Family Cookbook • David Gilmour on the Indian stories and poems of Rudyard Kipling • Ysenda Maxtone Graham on Peter Fleming, News from Tartary & Ella Maillart, Forbidden Journey • Ken Haigh on Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler • Melissa Harrison on Antonia White, Frost in May • Michael Holyroyd on John Stewart Collis • Nigel Jarrett on Strunk & White, The Elements of Style

• John Keay on Nicolas Bouvier, The Scorpion-Fish Stone of Reynolds © The Estate

• Andrew Nixon on E. F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia novels 54,

• Galen O’Hanlon on Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac Issue • Elisabeth Russell Taylor on Sydney Owenson, The Wild Irish Girl SF • Colin Williams on Richard Adams, Watership Down From • Hazel Wood on Adrian Bell, The Cherry Tree ‘A much-valued focal point for a literary world that most people had assumed had vanished forever – one that eschews most modern publishing trends, pretty much rejects the persuasions of profit-led publicity and marketing strategies for sub-standard books and instead concentrates on the traditional core values of enduring literary talent and exceptional writing.’ Caught by the River

3 Slightly Foxed Editions

These classic memoirs, each published in a limited and numbered hardback pocket edition, are compulsively readable and irresistibly collectable. Hand-numbered limited editions of 2,000 copies per title • Cloth-bound hardbacks Coloured endpapers • 170 x 110mm • Silk headband, tailband and ribbon marker Blind blocking to front • Gold blocking to spine Price: £17.50 per title • 40% discount • Firm sale • Free UK p&p ISBN No. Author Title Pub Date 978-1-910898-03-1 38 Adrian Bell The Cherry Tree June 2017 978-1-910898-00-0 37 Hilary Mantel Giving up the Ghost Mar 2017 978-1-906562-92-2 35 Anthony Rhodes Sword of Bone Sept 2016 978-1-906562-88-5 34 John Moore Brensham Village June 2016 978-1-906562-85-4 33 Diana Petre The Secret Orchard Mar 2016 978-1-906562-83-0 32 Helene Hanff 84, Charing Cross Road Dec 2015 978-1-906562-76-2 31 Gavin Maxwell The House of Elrig Sept 2015 978-1-906562-75-5 30 Adrian Bell Silver Ley June 2015 978-1-906562-74-8 29 Michael Holroyd Basil Street Blues Mar 2015 978-1-906562-70-0 28 Gerald Durrell My Family & Other Animals Dec 2014 978-1-906562-67-0 27 Harold Carlton Marrying Out Sept 2014 978-1-906562-66-3 26 John Moore Portrait of Elmbury June 2014 978-1-906562-51-9 22 Richard Hillyer Country Boy June 2013 978-1-906562-47-2 21 Ysenda Maxtone Graham The Real Mrs Miniver Mar 2013 978-1-906562-42-7 20 Denis Constanduros My Grandfather . . . Dec 2012 978-1-906562-39-7 18 Elspeth Huxley The Flame Trees of Thika June 2012 ‘Smashing little hardbacks the way hardbacks used to be . . . produced by people who love books, for people who love books’ Belgravia Books New this summer No. 38 Adrian Bell the cherry tree When the rather delicate would-be poet Adrian Bell left public school at Uppingham, his father, like fathers the world over, urged him to ‘get a proper job’. And perhaps no one was more surprised than he when Bell elected to leave home in Chelsea to work on a Suffolk farm.

But that decision was the making of him. Gradually, under the wise guidance of his employer Mr Colville, he learned to love and understand the land, his health and strength improved, and out of the experience he wrote a trilogy of books that have been loved ever since they were first

4 published in the early 1930s. These were the books that soldiers slipped into their kitbags when they went to war in 1939, to remind them of the country they were fighting for and the lives that many of them had left behind. The Cherry Tree is the final volume in this trilogy of lightly fictionalized memoirs (see SF Paperbacks forCorduroy and SFE 30 for Silver Ley), and by the time it opens Bell has acquired his own small farm near the pleasant little Georgian town of Bury St Edmunds, which he calls Stambury. But just as today, farming can be a lonely business, and partly to fill his solitary evenings Bell sits down to record his experiences. This results in the publication of his first book, Corduroy, and a fan letter from a young woman he calls Nora, whom he eventually meets and marries. The picture of their young married life is a cheerful one as they share the work of the farm, explore the countryside in their pony and trap, and furnish the house with bits and pieces picked up in the Stambury junk shops. But The Cherry Tree also records in poignant detail the dying days of an old order before mechanization took over completely, and the growing agricultural depression which would change for ever the face of the countryside and the lives of their country neighbours. In this final book of the trilogy Bell’s poetic eye and farmer’s knowledge come together once more to complete a timeless record of life on the land which still resonates today. (256 pages)

Also available

No. 37 • Hilary Mantel, Giving up the Ghost Hilary Mantel has said that this powerful and haunting book came about by accident. She never intended to write a memoir, but the sale of a much-loved cottage in Norfolk prompted her to write about the death of her stepfather, and from there ‘the whole story of my life began to unravel’. Giving up the Ghost is a story of ‘wraiths and phantoms’, and of a life full of challenges, but it is very far from being a misery memoir. Rather it is a compulsively readable and ultimately optimistic account of what made Hilary Mantel the writer she is, full of courage, insight and wry humour. (232 pages)

No. 35 • Anthony Rhodes, Sword of Bone It’s hard to imagine that anyone who took part in the disaster of Dunkirk could write an amusing book about it. But that is what Anthony Rhodes has done in Sword of Bone, his wry account of the events leading up to the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force in May 1940 – a ‘strategic withdrawal according to plan’ as the chaos was officially described. Being observant and cool-headed, with an ironic sense of humour, he manages to capture the absurdity as well as the tragedy of what took place. (320 pages)

No. 34 • John Moore, Brensham Village In this second volume of Moore’s interwar trilogy the setting moves from Elmbury – a lightly disguised version of Tewkesbury, where Moore grew up – to a village nearby. It is the 1930s, there is unemployment, and change is creeping in with mannerless weekenders arriving from the city, a shady ‘Syndicate’ of developers, an ugly petrol station and a local cinema. But there is still cricket on the village green, and Moore and his friends still go fishing, ferreting and bird’s- nesting. Moore tenderly evokes the last shadows of an England that was on the very point of vanishing. (272 pages)

No. 33 • Diana Petre, The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerley Diana and her twin sisters grew up in Barnes, South London, in the care of an elderly housekeeper, having been abandoned in 1912 by their mother, the enigmatic Mrs Muriel Perry, whose real name and true identity were a mystery. After an absence of ten years, Muriel reappeared and took charge of her children, with disastrous results. For the girls, one of the highlights of their isolated lives were visits from a kindly man they knew as ‘Uncle Bodger’. In fact, as Muriel finally revealed in characteristically brutal fashion, he was their father, Roger Ackerley.( 272 pages)

No. 32 • Helene Hanff,8 4, Charing Cross Road In the drab and traumatized post-war London of 1949, Marks & Co., second-hand and antiquarian booksellers at 84, Charing Cross Road, received an enquiry from ‘a poor writer with an antiquarian taste in books’, a Miss Helene Hanff of New York City. It was the beginning of a correspondence that would last for twenty years and the result is this gloriously heart-warming account of a friendship conducted through letters. (240 pages)

5 No. 31 • Gavin Maxwell, The House of Elrig The writer and naturalist Gavin Maxwell is best known for Ring of Bright Water, his moving account of raising otters on the remote west coast of Scotland. In his childhood memoir The House of Elrig he describes, with the same lyrical power that made that earlier book a classic, how it all began. In loving detail he evokes the wild moorland country around his Scottish home and the creatures that inhabited it. As was then the custom, he was ripped away from this paradise to go to a series of brutalizing schools. But always in his imagination he was at Elrig. It was his refuge and his escape, and the power of his longing and the ecstasy of each return fuel this haunting book. (256 pages)

No. 30 • Adrian Bell, Silver Ley *Vol. ii in the Adrian Bell trilogy* In this captivating sequel to Corduroy, his account of moving from London as a young man to learn farming in Suffolk after the First World War, Adrian Bell describes the hardships and happiness of setting up on his own farm. The story opens in1921 as Bell wakes, full of hope, to start his new life at Silver Ley. This second book in Bell’s farming trilogy is an extraordinarily moving, quietly observed and unsentimental picture of a rural world and a way of life which was even then fading. (288 pages)

No. 29 • Michael Holroyd, Basil Street Blues Well-known for his frank biographies of such controversial figures as Augustus John and Lytton Strachey, Holroyd teases out the story of his own distinctly problematic family in this delightful and original book. His volatile father, always busy with his own enterprises, and his glamorous Swedish mother with her succession of exotic husbands, had only walk-on parts in his life. It was only after both his parents had died that he was overcome by a desire to find the ‘connecting story’ which his fragmented childhood had so lacked. The result is a very personal detective story, subtle, funny and poignant. (368 pages)

No. 28 • Gerald Durrell, My Family & Other Animals In 1935 the Durrell family sold their house and ‘like a flock of migrating swallows’ fled from the depressing grey damp of an English summer to the Mediterranean warmth and colour of Corfu. For Gerry, this was where paradise began. For the next five years, despite his mother’s anxious attempts to educate him, he was allowed to run wild, glorying in the freedom and beauty of the island. My Family & Other Animals is a perfect family book for reading aloud, a funny, magical evocation of a boyish paradise which has been a favourite with readers of all ages since it was first published nearly sixty years ago. (384 pages)

No. 27 • Harold Carlton, Marrying Out This darkly comic story of a Jewish family’s rise and fall is seen through the eyes of the teenage Harold Carlton, lightly disguised as ‘Howard Conway’. But you don’t have to be Jewish to recognize the characters in this dysfunctional family – Howard’s dyspeptic and dominating father; his delightful but dissatisfied mother; his brother and sister, who provide a kind of background chorus; lovable, easy-going Grandad, with his surprise secret life; and glorious, ghastly Grandma, the arch manipulator and expert in emotional blackmail. A brilliantly observed study of family dynamics, and of a certain kind of Jewish life in 1950s North London. (288 pages)

No. 26 • John Moore, Portrait of Elmbury Born in 1907, John Moore grew up in Tewkesbury at a time when such small English market towns still had a distinct and sturdy life of their own. Mass travel, mass media and the changes brought about by two world wars would gradually destroy this self-contained rural society, but in Portrait of Elmbury, the first book in a trilogy based on his home town, Moore caught and preserved it in captivating detail. Though far from sentimental, it is a joyful hymn to the fullness and variety of small-town life compared to the life he found in the city. (288 pages) *Only available with Brensham Village*

No. 22 • Richard Hillyer, Country Boy Richard Hillyer was the pseudonym used by Charles Stranks, a farmworker’s son who grew up in great poverty in a remote Buckinghamshire village in the years before and during the First World War. Country Boy is the extraordinary and moving story of how, against incredible odds, he managed to educate himself and get to university. Written with almost painful honesty, it is both an unsentimental picture of rural life in the early years of the last century, and a deeply poetic evocation of the unspoilt English countryside and its effect on the imagination of a lone and sensitive boy. (256 pages)

6 No. 21 • Ysenda Maxtone Graham, The Real Mrs Miniver The exemplary middle-class housewife Mrs Miniver, whose doings first appeared on the Court pages of The Times, was said by Winston Churchill to have done more for the Allied cause in the Second World War than a flotilla of battleships. Everyone assumed that Mrs Miniver was a portrait of her creator, Jan Struther, but the reality was very different. Ysenda, Jan’s granddaughter, draws a vivid portrait of this fascinating and contradictory woman whose own creation ultimately forced her to lead a painful double life. (320 pages)

No. 20 • Denis Constanduros, My Grandfather & Father, Dear Father These delightfully funny and affectionate portraits of the two most influential male figures in the author’s life conjure up two strongly defined characters and the times in which they lived. The two could hardly have been more different. Denis’s maternal grandfather, though surviving sturdily into the reign of George V, was to his grandson a character from the ‘warm, gas-lit, stable-smelling past’ of the Victorian age and symbolized everything that was convivial and straightforward and reliable. His father Stephanos Constanduros, however, was flamboyant, melodramatic and full of grand ideas for solving his perpetual financial problems at a stroke – a tendency which ultimately led to disaster. A small jewel of a book, which attracted huge attention when it was read on BBC Radio 4. (272 pages)

No. 18 • Elspeth Huxley, The Flame Trees of Thika When Elspeth Huxley’s family arrived in Nairobi in 1913, British East Africa was still a Garden of Eden, virtually untouched by the destructive hand of man. It was also a land of dreams, a place for the recouping of lost fortunes by those who hadn’t managed things very well elsewhere. Elspeth Huxley evokes both the harshness and the beauty of the life that, against all the odds, they managed to create, the mutually dependent society of those early white settlers, and the effect of Africa and its native population on the imagination of a solitary and self-sufficient child.( 360 pages)

‘The books are seemingly designed to look like the kinds of books you’d absent-mindedly pick up in an junk or antique shop somewhere on a weekend outing, then decide not to buy. Yet here they are, looking gloriously out of place in the middle of the rampantly modern and individuated shelves of a major contemporary bookshop . . .’ Independent

7 Plain Foxed Editions Some of the most popular titles in our limited editions series of classic memoirs have sold out, but we are now making a number of them available in a plainer, unnumbered hardback edition. These sturdy little books, bound in duck-egg blue cloth, come in the same neat pocket format as the original SFEs, and bear attractive and informative bellybands.

Duck-egg blue cloth-bound hardback • Cream endpapers • 170 x 110mm Gold blocking to spine • Silk headband, tailband and ribbon marker Price: £17.50 per title • 40% discount • Firm sale • Free UK p&p ISBN Author Title Pub Date 978-1-906562-97-7 Ysenda Maxtone Graham Terms & Conditions: Life in Girls’ Nov 2016 Boarding-Schools 1939–1979 978-1-906562-94-6 Ysenda Maxtone Graham Mr Tibbits’s Catholic School Sept 2016

Country Life Book of the Week

Ysenda Maxtone Graham, Terms & Conditions: Life in Girls’ Boarding-Schools, 1939–1979

As we discover from Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s quietly hilarious history of life in British girls’ boarding-schools between 1939 and 1979, this was a not untypical reaction. Today it’s hard to grasp the casual carelessness and even hostility with which the middle and upper classes once approached the schooling of their daughters. Education, far from being regarded as something that would set a girl up for life, was seen as a handicap which could render her too unattractive for marriage, and with some notable exceptions such as Cheltenham, schools went along with the idea. While their brothers at Eton and Harrow were writing Latin verse and doing quadratic equations, girls were being allowed to give up any subject they found too difficult and were instead learning how to lay the table for lunch. In Terms & Conditions Ysenda speaks to members of a lost tribe – the Boarding-school Women, grandmothers now and the backbone of the nation, who look back on their experiences with a mixture of horror and humour. A number of famous women were interviewed for this book (among them Arabella Boxer, Amanda Craig, Josceline Dimbleby, Valerie Grove, Fiona MacCarthy, Emma Tennant, Ann Leslie, Artemis Cooper, Katherine Whitehorn, Polly Toynbee, Judith Kerr and Anne Heseltine) but famous or not, all are equally important to the story. (272 pages)

‘The most brilliant, hilarious book’ India Knight

Ysenda Maxtone Graham, Mr Tibbits’s Catholic School Like many of the best books, this unusual history of an unusual school – St Philip’s prep-school in Kensington, founded in 1934 by Catholic convert Richard Tibbits and still going strong today – is hard to classify. ‘As you live through its story in these chapters,’ the author promises her readers, ‘you’ll be taken on a meander through the twentieth century. War, rationing, smog, mini-skirts, maxi-skirts, strikes, Thatcherism, the first computer . . .’ Enough to say that for anyone who has enjoyed Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall or Ronald Searle’s St Trinian’s, anyone who loves to laugh yet feels the poignancy of the passage of time, this book will be a treat. (200 pages)

‘A small but perfectly formed masterpiece’ Rupert Christiansen

8 Slightly Foxed Paperbacks

Delightful to look at, pocket-sized, easy to handle and elegantly produced on good cream paper, our paperbacks give readers the chance to acquire some of the original hardbacks no longer available.

Sewn paperback • French flaps •170 x 110mm £12 per title • 40% discount • Free UK p&p Sale or return if returned in pristine condition ISBN Author Title Pub Date 978-1-906562-82-3 Frances Wood Hand-grenade Practice in Peking Sept 2015 978-1-906562-68-7 Dodie Smith Look Back With Love Sept 2014 978-1-906562-48-9 Edward Ardizzone The Young Ardizzone Mar 2014 978-1-906562-49-6 V. S. Pritchett A Cab at the Door Sept 2013 978-1-906562-44-1 Michael Jenkins A House in Flanders Mar 2013 978-1-906562-45-8 Priscilla Napier A Late Beginner Mar 2013 978-1-906562-37-3 Adrian Bell Corduroy Mar 2012 978-1-906562-33-5 Diana Holman-Hunt My Grandmothers and I Mar 2012 978-1-906562-36-6 Rosemary Sutcliff Blue Remembered Hills Sept 2011

Frances Wood, Hand-grenade Practice in Peking China in 1975 was a strange, undiscovered country, still half-mad from Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, when young Frances Wood boarded a plane in London to study for a year in Peking. Virtually closed to outsiders for the preceding decade, China was just beginning to make tentative moves towards the outside world when Frances and her fellow students were driven in an ancient coach through the dark silent countryside to their new quarters at the Foreign Languages Institute. Throughout the following year in an extraordinary Alice-in-Wonderland world where ‘education’ consisted of shovelling rubble, hand-grenade practice and cripplingly tedious ideological lectures, Frances never lost her sense of humour. Based on the letters she wrote home in 1975‒6, Hand-grenade Practice in Peking is both affecting and hilarious. (240 pages)

Dodie Smith, Look Back with Love The author of I Capture the Castle grew up in Manchester among her mother’s doting family, since her father had died when she was a baby. It was the jolliest environment imaginable – the Furbers adored seaside trips, motor-car outings, fairgrounds, circuses, jokes, charades and musical soirées, all of which had their influence on Dodie. Her memoir gives a wonderful picture of this large Edwardian family, of life in the ‘basking Sunday afternoon charm’ of Manchester’s Victorian suburbs, and of the little girl who said, ‘I think I’m an oddity really. But I do my very, very best to write well.’ (272 pages)

Edward Ardizzone, The Young Ardizzone The creator of the ever-popularLittle Tim and Lucy books begins his story in 1905 when he was 5 and his mother brought him and his two sisters home to England from Haiphong where his father was a telegraph engineer. Left in Suffolk in the care of their grandmother, the three grew up with a full complement of young bachelor uncles, great-aunts and eccentric family friends – a comfortable Edwardian world which is beautifully captured in Ardizzone’s deceptively simple prose and delicately humorous drawings. (208 pages)

9 V. S. Pritchett, A Cab at the Door The writer V. S. Pritchett’s mother was an irrepressible cockney, his father a reckless, over-optimistic peacock of a man, always embarking on new business ventures which inevitably crashed – hence the ‘cab at the door’ waiting to bear the family quietly away from yet another set of creditors. In this vigorous and original memoir Pritchett captures unforgettably the smells, sounds and voices of London in the first decades of the twentieth century, and the cast of Dickensian characters among whom he grew up. (296 pages)

Michael Jenkins, A House in Flanders In 1951, a shy and solitary 14-year-old boy was sent by his parents to spend the summer with ‘the aunts in Flanders’. His account of those months in the old French country house on the edge of the Flanders Plain has an idyllic, dream- like quality. Yet all was not as idyllic as at first it seemed. Gradually he teases out the history of the family and of the surrounding area and finally uncovers the secret at the heart of the book – the reason he has been sent there.( 216 pages)

Priscilla Napier, A Late Beginner Priscilla Napier and her brother and sister grew up in Egypt during the last golden years of the Edwardian Age. Here she brings to life that far-off world – the house and its devoted Egyptian servants, the desert picnics with Nanny, the visits to Cairo Zoo, the afternoons playing in the grounds of the Gezira Sporting Club – and the long summers in England among their mother’s family, as the First World War began to take its tragic toll of uncles and cousins. It is a wonderful evocation of a place, a time and a climate of mind – a book that, as Penelope Lively writes in her preface, ‘ranks quite simply with the greatest accounts of how it is to be a child’. (336 pages)

Adrian Bell, Corduroy *Vol. i in the Adrian Bell trilogy* When Adrian Bell left London in 1920 to learn agriculture on a Suffolk farm, like many townies he assumed at first that the locals were somewhat simple. But soon his own ignorance and inability to do the most basic physical tasks taught him a new respect. He grew to love the land, and Corduroy is filled with precise and poetic descriptions of the countryside and of farming life. Not merely a period piece, it captures what is unchanging about the lives of those who live from, rather than simply on, the land. (288 pages)

Diana Holman-Hunt, My Grandmothers and I Diana Holman-Hunt spent her Edwardian childhood shuttling between two wildly contrasting grandparents. Her paternal grandmother, the eccentric widow of the pre-Raphaelite painter Holman-Hunt, lived entirely in the past in her big gaunt house in Kensington, while her mother’s mother, in her comfortable and well-ordered home on the edge of the Sussex marshes, lived entirely in the present. Both competed for Diana’s affection while being spectacularly blind to her needs. My Grandmothers and I is Diana’s touching and darkly funny memoir of that time – a small comic masterpiece of pitch-perfect dialogue and deadpan observation. (288 pages)

Rosemary Sutcliff, Blue Remembered Hills One of Britain’s most distinguished children’s writers tells the story of her own childhood in this vivid and touching memoir. Permanently disabled by juvenile arthritis, she grew up more than usually sensitive to her surroundings – the naval dockyards at Chatham where her father worked and the beautiful countryside where she and her parents went to live when he retired. After art school and the heartbreak of a failed love affair she finally found her vocation in writing novels that would bring the past vividly alive for generations of children. Her own story is the very opposite of a misery memoir, full of humour, affection and joy.( 208 pages)

10 Slightly Foxed Cubs

Slightly Foxed Cubs is a series of reissues of classic children’s books which strike a nostalgic chord with many older readers and introduce a younger generation to writers whose books have, unaccountably, been allowed to slip out of print. The current titles in the series are all by master storyteller Ronald Welch. Grippingly plotted and scrupulously researched, these brilliant historical novels are fast-paced, colourful and imaginative, joining up the dots of English history in a remarkably vivid and human way. We’re delighted to make these books available again, with their original illustrations, in this elegantly designed series. This September we’ll be adding another favourite author, the inimitable ‘BB’, to the list when we publish The Little Grey Menand Down the Bright Stream.

Cloth-bound hardback • Illustrated • 220 x 155m Price £18 • 40% discount; firm sale • Suitable for all readers aged10 + Price: £17.50 per title • 40% discount • Firm sale • Free UK p&p

ISBN Author Title Pub Date 978-1-906562-99-1 Ronald Welch Sun of York Sept 2017 978-1-906562-91-5 Ronald Welch Tank Commander Sept 2016 978-1-906562-90-8 Ronald Welch Ensign Carey Sept 2016 978-1-906562-84-7 Ronald Welch Mohawk Valley March 2016 978-1-906562-81-6 Ronald Welch Nicholas Carey Sept 2015 978-1-906562-72-4 Ronald Welch Escape from France Sept 2015 978-1-906562-71-7 Ronald Welch Captain of March 2015 978-1-906562-64-9 Ronald Welch The Hawk Sept 2014 978-1-906562-63-2 Ronald Welch Bowman of Crécy Sept 2014 978-1-906562-60-1 Ronald Welch Captain of Foot March 2014 978-1-906562-53-3 Ronald Welch For the King Sept 2013 978-1-906562-54-0 Ronald Welch The Galleon* Sept 2013 978-1-906562-52-6 Ronald Welch * Sept 2013 *only available when ordered as a set of all 13 titles, issued with the same limited-edition no.

Making History Make Sense

Ronald Welch was a gifted teacher and a brilliant storyteller who knew precisely how to convey information to young readers without losing their attention. Fast paced and colourful, his novels join up the dots of English history in a remarkably vivid and human way. The plots are gripping, the characters believable and the research meticulous – you can’t finish a Welch book without having grasped such precise details as the construction of a Crusader’s armour and why it was so designed, or why the longbow was crucial to the English victory at the Battle of Crécy. Real historical characters are woven into the stories, though Welch is careful to explain at the end of each book what is fiction and what established historical fact. Over the years the Carey novels, published between 1954 and 1976, have collected a large fan club of younger (and often older) readers. However, the original editions, published by Oxford University Press and illustrated by some of the best book illustrators of their day, are now almost impossible to find. Each title is published in a limited edition of2,000 copies. PTO for a full list. 11 the hundred the wars of the crusades >> >> >> elizabeth 1 years’ war the roses >> >> >>

Bowman of Crécy Sun of York The Hawk This is the real Set during the Harry is a young story of one of final years of the naval officer Edward III’s Wars of the Roses, aboard one of campaigns. Sir Sun of York tells his father, the John Carey is on the story of Owen Earl of Aubigny’s his way to the wars Lloyd, a young merchant ships in France when and impoverished running between >> his life is saved by aristocrat who London and Knight Crusader an unlikely hero, is determined to Santander during Young Philip Hugh Fletcher, reverse the family’s the reign of d’Aubigny, son of head of a band of fortunes. Owen Queen Elizabeth. a rich Crusader outlaws. Sir John distinguishes Relations with family who have adopts Hugh and himself in battle Spain are tense stayed on in his men as part and contributes and Harry finds the Holy Land of his army and to the victory of himself called after the First they follow him to the Yorkist King on to save the Crusade, finds France, where their Edward IV. This is ship from seizure himself caught courage and skill a brilliant coming- by the Spanish up in the fight as longbowmen of-age novel which authorities, and to against Saladin, are crucial in fits perfectly into help scupper a during which he the defeat of the the Carey series. plot to assassinate is captured and French at the (232 pages) the Queen. encounters the Battle of Crécy. (224 pages) legendary Emir (192 pages) himself. Finally, in a series of hair- raising adventures, he escapes to take possession of the family’s Welsh estate. (256 pages)

12 the english the battle elizabeth 1 >> >> >> the seven years’ war >> civil war of blenheim >>

Captain of Dragoons Charles Carey is a Captain in the Duke of Marlborough’s army – a moody, quick-tempered and charismatic figure who is also a brilliant swordsman. Having discovered that there is a >> >> traitor in the camp, Charles is sent to The Galleon For the King spy in France on a mission that ends with his imprisonment in the Bastille. After killing a man It’s 1642 and the But he escapes in time to take part in a duel, penniless country is riven in Marlborough’s decisive victory at Carey cousin by civil war. Blenheim. (224 pages) Robert Penderyn Home-loving Neil escapes reprisal Carey reluctantly by joining his sets out from the uncle’s merchant family’s Welsh ship sailing for estate to fight on Santander. England the Royalist side and Spain are in the regiment his engaged in a father has raised. trade war, and Sensitive and small the English never in stature, Neil know when they has always lived in will fall foul of the his older brother’s port authorities or shadow, but he >> the Inquisition. acquits himself Returning after courageously in Mohawk Valley months in a battle, and when In 1755 Alan Carey is sent to the colony Spanish prison he is captured by of New York by his father the Earl to look Robert becomes the Roundheads at into his estates in Mohawk Valley. It’s a life- involved in foiling Marston Moor, his changing experience. Alan grows in moral a Catholic plot to life is saved by his stature as he deals with a dishonest bailiff, put Mary Queen own honesty. (224 learns the ways of the forest, overcomes of Scots on the pages) hostile Indians and renders invaluable English throne. service to General Wolfe during the capture (192 pages) of . (224 pages) 13 revolutionary >> >> the peninsular war >> the >> the indian mutiny france >>

Escape from France >> >> With news of the revolution in France, the Careys are anxious Nicholas Carey Ensign Carey about the fate of their relatives, the On holiday in Italy, In the seedy aristocratic d’Assailly family. Young Captain Nicholas and dangerous Richard Carey, still a Cambridge Carey is persuaded by mid-nineteenth student but already an outstanding his impulsive cousin century London swordsman, is sent secretly by his to help three Italian underworld, father Lord Aubigny on a mercy revolutionaries avoid William Carey mission to bring them back to capture and escape has a frightening England. When he arrives at their the Papal States. After encounter with château in Normandy Richard returning to England, George Hampton, finds that the Marquis has already Nicholas runs his cousin a violent and been arrested and he and his cousin to earth in Paris, where unprincipled Armand set out for Paris with a he is still involved with young man on the bold plan to spring him from the the revolutionaries, make. Banished Abbaye prison. A complex tale of and the two foil an from Cambridge daring and disguise. (192 pages) assassination attempt on as a result, in 1856 Napoleon III. Nicholas William travels to then rejoins his India, where his regiment and is sent to father has obtained fight the Russians with a commission for Lord Raglan’s army, him in the 84th where he distinguishes Bengal Native himself in the Battles Infantry, and of Sebastopol and The his path again Redan. (224 pages) crosses that of >> Hampton. William Captain of Foot is no saint, but Young Christopher Carey is serving as a Lieutenant in the 43rd when the Indian Light Infantry – part of the famous Light Brigade – under Mutiny breaks out Wellington. Chris takes part in the retreat to Corunna with Sir among the native John Moore, fights in the major battles of Vimiero and Busaco, is troops, he acts captured by the French, escapes and falls in with Spanish guerrillas, with generosity and ends up as a Captain, having been noticed by Wellington and courage. (200 himself. (224 pages) pages) 14 the first world war >>

Tank Commander In the summer of 1914 the Germans enter Belgium and Britain mobilizes for war. Second Lieutenant John Carey, with his regiment the West Glamorgans, exchanges his comfortable quarters at Tidworth for the mud and bloodshed of the trenches. As the death toll mounts, John is called on to take responsibility far beyond his rank and experience in what often seems a hopeless situation. But with the introduction of a revolutionary new weapon – the tank – the tide begins to turn. (232 pages)

15 Spring Bookshop of the Quarter: Aldeburgh Bookshop

Situated in the seaside town of Aldeburgh, this handsome red bookshop looks out over the North Sea and welcomes book-seeking locals and visiting tourists all year round. It may be small and independent, but it is at the centre of all manner of literary activity. Since taking on the bookshop more than seventeen years ago, husband-and-wife team Mary and John James have started their own thriving literary festival, organized many varied bookclubs, hosted hundreds of events and even produced a handful of bookshop publications. We were delighted to sit down with Mary for a quiet five minutes to discover more about it.

Please tell us about your bookshop. What makes it special? When we bought the Aldeburgh Bookshop in 2000 it was already a much loved part of the High Street and has been for nearly seventy years – we are just the latest in a long line of owners. One of the reasons it is so special is that we are completely independent, which means we can respond to our customers’ requests and interests, as well as promoting the books we care so strongly about. Our bestsellers are often wildly different from the published lists. And we learn a great deal from well-read and discerning customers.

What first inspired you to become a bookseller? The shop inspired us. I had spent all my working life with books as an antiquarian bookseller, but it was a new world for John, who was working as a chartered surveyor in commercial property. The bookshop gave us the opportunity to move our young family to the countryside and both of us were keen readers so it didn’t seem like a hardship to spend all day discussing books. It has been very hard work, but we haven’t regretted it for a single moment. Working together has its challenges, but we are in our eighteenth year now, so we must be over the worst bit.

What are your all-time favourite reads and why? It is very difficult to answer this question, but I suppose we could pick a few favourites. One of my all-time top books is This Thing of Darknessby Harry Thompson, an extraordinary historical novel about Captain Fitzroy of HMS Beagle fame. John is on a mission to make everyone read The Transylvanian Trilogy by Miklós Bánffy. The first one is calledThey Were Counted and I am relieved to say that Arcadia books have just republished it with a beautiful new cover. Otherwise we would have had to ring up and remonstrate if they let it go out of print again. I read some fabulous books last year: Golden Hill by Francis Spufford andThe Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead were among my top favourites.

Who would be your dream bookshop party guests? We are very fortunate in that every year we get to invite our dream party guests to come and talk at our Aldeburgh Literary Festival. If we admire a writer, we ask them to come and speak and as a result we have the best three-day-long parties in March every year. This year we had Ian McEwan coming for the second time, talking about his dazzling new novel Nutshell. I have also loved Christopher de Hamel’s book on medieval manuscripts. And Nick Davies’s unputdownable book about the cuckoo is science writing at its best.

Who has been your favourite customer? We couldn’t single out a favourite customer, but I love any customer who returns and says ‘That book you recommended was . . . wonderful’. In our first year, one customer orderedThe No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agen- cy and came back to tell us how good it was. Intrigued, we read it and spread the word: that was the very early days of Alexander McCall Smith when he was still published by Polygon and you could only buy his books in New York and Aldeburgh. London hadn’t discovered him yet. We’ve met him since and even been mentioned in one of his books. Ronald Blythe told me one of my favourite stories about the shop: he came in with E. M. Forster in the 50s. Forster wanted to buy some ink, but the then owner was in a hurry to close early to catch the train to London and threw them both out. Imagine, chucking both E. M. Forster and Ronald Blythe out of your bookshop.

What are your top book picks for spring 2017? Lucy Hughes-Hallett, biographer and prize-winning author of The Pike, has written her first novel, Peculiar Ground, which will be published in May. It is a beautifully written historical novel with many themes, one of which examines walls as objects of exclusion as well as protection. A returning aristocrat ruffles feathers in Restoration Oxfordshire when he encloses his parkland by raising a wall; 300 years later Europe is shaken as the Berlin Wall is dismantled. This is highly recommended, and timely.

The Aldeburgh Bookshop42 High Street, Aldeburgh www.aldeburghbookshop.co.uk • @AldeBooks www.foxedquarterly.com/blog