Podd: Slightly Foxed

52: William Golding: A Literary Colossus

15 januari 2025 | 59 min

The first title that springs to mind at the mention of William Golding’s name is most often Lord of the Flies. The classic story of a group of schoolboys marooned on a desert island all but made his reputation and has somewhat overshadowed his twelve other novels.

Golding was a fascinating and often troubled man, a voracious reader who enjoyed the Odyssey in Greek as well as Georgette Heyer and Jilly Cooper and was an influence on many novelists from Stephen King to Penelope Lively, Ben Okri and Kazuo Ishiguro. Definitely a writer ripe for rediscovery.

Now, the Slightly Foxed team sit down with the author’s daughter Judy and Golding expert Professor Tim Kendall to discuss the life and work of this brave and highly original writer, whose novels transport the reader to distant but entirely believable worlds. His work grapples with the big questions of existence but his originality as a writer sometimes worked against him, and Lord of the Flies was rejected by seven publishers before it was accepted by Charles Monteith at Faber. It was glowingly reviewed and became a bestseller but, behind the scenes, Golding was struggling with his addiction to alcohol and the fame his writing would bring him. After a poor reception from the critics for several of his following books, including both The Spire and The Pyramid, Golding was thrown into a deep depression. This crisis lasted over ten years, but when he finally returned to writing he went on to produce a series of successful novels – including Rites of Passage, winner of the 1980 Booker Prize. In 1983 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The usual round of reading recommendations include South from Granada, Gerald Brenan’s recollection of the years he spent in an Andalusian village in the 1920s with visits from the Bloomsbury group; Robert Harris’s Precipice, a semi-fictional account of the relationship in 1914 between Prime Minister Asquith, and Venetia Stanley, and Penelope Lively’s novel Passing On.

For episode show notes, please see the Slightly Foxed website.
Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No. 3 in E Major by Bach
Hosted by Rosie Goldsmith
Produced by Philippa Goodrich

51: John le Carré: Secrets & Lies

15 oktober 2024 | 51 min

‘David at his worst was a liar but John le Carré at his best was a truth teller.’ These were the intriguing words with which his biographer Adam Sisman concluded the conversation when he joined the Slightly Foxed Podcast team at the kitchen table to discuss the life and work of the writer who was born David Cornwell but who is better known to the world as John le Carré.

Graham Greene, whom le Carré greatly admired, once said that ‘an unhappy childhood is an asset for a writer’, and this young David had in spades. He was only 5 when he and his older brother were abandoned by their mother, to be brought up by their father, a domineering, larger-than-life conman, wife-beater and sexual tyrant, whose overwhelming personality would haunt David for the rest of his life and was the inspiration for his novel A Perfect Spy.

These ‘hugless’ childhood years, as David called them, were ones of stark contrasts. At one moment the family would be living like princes, the next bailiffs were in the house and their father might even be in jail. The boys were taught early on to lie convincingly in order to bail their father out, so the scene was set for the kind of double life that David would later lead when he worked for the secret service, and for the shadowy worlds of violence and betrayal that he created in his novels. It also produced a man who sought out danger, both in doing his meticulous research, and in his multiple affairs with women, a subject Adam explored in a second biography, The Secret Life of John Le Carré, published after le Carré’s death.

Adam speaks fascinatingly about his often tense relationship with this complex, brilliant and seductively charming man whose great Cold War novels such as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, with their brilliant dialogue and scene-setting and their unforgettable central character George Smiley, are felt by many to far transcend the genre of spy fiction.

To finish, there’s the usual round-up of reading recommendations including a personal and passionate account of Putin’s Russia through the eyes of a BBC journalist, Goodbye to Russia by Sarah Rainsford, and A Voyage around the Queen by Craig Brown, an exceptionally researched and hilarious biography of sorts of our late Queen Elizabeth II.

For episode show notes, please see the Slightly Foxed website.
Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No. 3 in E Major by Bach
Hosted by Rosie Goldsmith
Produced by Philippa Goodrich

50: Barbara Comyns: Stranger than Fiction

15 juli 2024 | 57 min

Any mention of Barbara Comyns usually brings an ‘I know the name but I don’t know anything about her’ kind of response. In this quarter’s literary podcast, presenter Rosie Goldsmith and the Slightly Foxed Editors sit down with Barbara’s biographer Avril Horner and Brett Wolstencroft, Manager of Daunt Books, to discover who this fascinating and forgotten novelist really was.

Though Barbara enjoyed success in the later part of her life, and a revival with Virago Books in the 1980s, it’s indicative of how thoroughly she disappeared from view that, as Avril tells us, she had difficulty in placing her wonderful biography, Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence, which was finally published this year.

Avril describes how, when working on her biography, she came across a huge cache of letters from the 1930s owned by Barbara’s granddaughter, some of which ‘made her gasp’, and the story of Barbara’s life in London is indeed often shocking. It’s a tale of almost unimaginable poverty, of tangled affairs with unsuitable men, of a grim experience of childbirth, and countless moves from one bleak rented property to another.

Yet after repeatedly hitting rock bottom Barbara always courageously picked herself up and started again. At various times she survived as a commercial artist, artist’s model, dog breeder, antique dealer, renovator of old pianos and dealer in classic cars. At last in 1945 she made a happy marriage to Richard Comyns-Carr, who worked for MI6 where he was a colleague and friend of Kim Philby.

The couple moved to Spain, and it was then that Barbara started to write novels drawing on her earlier life such as Sisters by a River and Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. She was admired by Graham Greene who became her publisher, and later came other novels of a more gothic and surrealist kind including A Touch of Mistletoe, Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead and The Vet’s Daughter. No two of her haunting and disturbing novels are alike for she wrote in a variety of genres. She’s an intriguing novelist, totally original, impossible to pigeonhole and ripe for re-rediscovery.

For episode show notes, please see the Slightly Foxed website.
Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No. 3 in E Major by Bach
Hosted by Rosie Goldsmith
Produced by Philippa Goodrich

My Salinger Year: Joanna Rakoff & Rosie Goldsmith in Conversation

10 maj 2024 | 58 min

‘There was no voicemail. I was the voicemail.’ In this out-of-series special episode of the Slightly Foxed podcast Joanna Rakoff, author of the 2008 literary smash hit My Salinger Year (released as a Slightly Foxed limited-edition hardback in March 2024), joins us down the line from her home in Massachusetts for a conversation with our podcast presenter Rosie Goldsmith.

From their respective sides of the Atlantic, Rosie and Joanna take a trip back to New York in the freezing winter of 1996 when Joanna Rakoff, aged 24, landed her first job as assistant at one of the city’s oldest and most distinguished literary agencies. No matter that she didn’t even know what a literary agent was and had lied about her typing speed. She’d also led her parents to believe she was living with a female college friend when she was in fact sharing an unheated Brooklyn apartment with a penniless and unpublished Marxist novelist whose sole and very part-time job was watering the plants at Goldman Sachs.

Rosie and Joanna take us deep into the strange, time-warped world she’s strayed into at The Agency, with its Selectric typewriters, filing cabinets and carbon paper, and into her unusual relationship with its best-known author J. D. Salinger, to whose mountain of fan mail it was Joanna’s job to reply. Salinger was famously reclusive, wanting nothing to do with his fans and Joanna was supposed to reply with a pro forma letter. But the more heart-wrenching the letters she read, the more she found herself pulled into the senders’ lives and, unbeknownst to her terrifying boss (‘whiskey mink, enormous sunglasses, a long cigarette holder’), she replied to every single one and sometimes, fatally, enclosed a personal note herself.

Joanna describes how My Salinger Year came to be, from a gem of an idea explored in the confessional 2011 BBC Sounds documentary Hey Mr Salinger to a best-selling memoir that inspired a Hollywood film starring Sigourney Weaver and Margaret Qualley, and how, when Salinger died, she turned to her bookshelves for comfort. Now, twenty years after its first publication, My Salinger Year joins the much loved Slightly Foxed Editions list of memoirs by such authors as Hilary Mantel, Jessica Mitford, Roald Dahl, Graham Greene and many others.

For episode show notes, please see the Slightly Foxed website.

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No. 3 in E Major by Bach

Hosted by Rosie Goldsmith

49: Down to Earth: A Farming Revival

15 april 2024 | 46 min

Sarah Langford, author of Rooted: How Regenerative Farming Can Change the World, joins the Slightly Foxed Editors and presenter Rosie Goldsmith round the kitchen table to tell us how and why she gave up her career as a criminal barrister to become a farmer, and about the woman who was her inspiration: Eve Balfour, the extraordinary aristocrat, founder of the Soil Association and author of The Living Soil.

Farming was in Sarah’s family. So when her own family’s circumstances changed and her husband was looking for a new direction, they said goodbye to the city and moved with their two young children to Suffolk, where they found themselves taking on the running of her father-in-law’s small arable farm. It was a steep learning curve and Sarah soon realized that the farming landscape had changed dramatically from the one she remembered: ‘My grandfather Peter was a hero who fed a starving nation. Now his son Charlie, my uncle, is considered a villain, blamed for ecological catastrophe and with a legacy no one wants.’

Needing to learn more, she describes how she travelled the country, hearing moving and inspiring human stories from small farmers who are farming in a new – but completely traditional – way, working to put more into the land than they are taking out of it, relying on natural processes like crop rotation and grazing animals rather than using chemicals to give life to the soil. This is regenerative farming – a hard row to hoe but with huge potential benefits for the planet as well as for us and other species. Sarah and her husband are now practising it on their own farm.

It’s a huge and fascinating topic, and other farming books and writers are touched on – A. G. Street’s Farmer’s Glory, Adrian Bell’s Corduroy trilogy and Apple Acre, today’s James Rebanks’s English Pastoral. Other related recommendations are From Mouths of Men by the rural historian George Ewart Evans, and the delightful Rivets, Trivets and Galvanized Buckets, the story of a village hardware shop by Tom Fort.

For episode show notes, please see the Slightly Foxed website.
Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No. 3 in E Major by Bach
Hosted by Rosie Goldsmith
Produced by Philippa Goodrich

48: Dear Dodie

15 januari 2024 | 55 min

47: Aspects of Orwell

15 oktober 2023 | 58 min

46: Return to Kettle’s Yard

15 juli 2023 | 54 min

Laura Freeman, chief art critic at The Times and author of Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists, and Kettle’s Yard Director Andrew Nairne take us back to Cambridge in this follow-up to Episode 30 of the Foxed pod.

Jim Ede was a man for whom art, books, beauty, friendship and creativity were essential facets of a happy and fulfilled life and, in her acclaimed group biography of Jim and his artists, Laura casts new light on the men and women who gently shaped a new way of making, seeing and living with art for the twentieth century. Laura and Andrew join Slightly Foxed Editors Gail and Hazel at the kitchen table to draw us deeper into Jim and his wife Helen’s way of life at Kettle’s Yard: a domestic home-cum-gallery where pausing to sit is encouraged and artworks, furniture, ceramics, books and found objects from the natural world live side by side in delicious harmony. We follow Laura upstairs to Helen’s sitting-room to meet Constanin Brâncuşi’s cement-cast head of the boy Prometheus, we pause in the light-filled Dancer Room to take in Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s bronze ballerina and we pass Barbara Hepworth’s strokable slate sculpture Three Personages on the landing before leafing through the bookshelves to discover hand-bound early editions of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and works by Henry James. We hear how Jim believed that art was for everyone and wasn’t just for looking at but also for touching, hearing and engaging with: a belief so central to his ethos that he would lend pieces to Cambridge University students to place in their own living spaces.

Books mentioned
We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with theSlightly Foxed office for more information.

Subscribe to Slightly Foxed magazine
Laura Freeman, Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists (0:55)
Virginia Woolf, Orlando (18:30)
Henry James, ‘The Great Good Place’ (19:46)
Richard Cobb, A Classical Education (45:34)
Adrian Bell, A Countryman’s Summer Notebook (46:00)
Lionel Davidson, The Night of Wenceslas (46:15)
Lionel Davidson, The Rose of Tibet (46:29)
Lionel Davidson, Kolymsky Heights (46:32)
Eric Carle, The Very Hungry Caterpillar (48:40)
Ann Pratchett, The Dutch House (49:18)
Osman Yousefzada, The Go-Between (50:59)

Related Slightly Foxed articles & podcast episodes

Episode 30 of the Slightly Foxed podcast: Jim Ede’s Way of Life
Living Art, Mark Haworth-Booth on Jim Ede, A Way of Life: Kettle’s Yard, Issue 42
The Pram in the Hall, Laura Freeman on Barbara Hepworth, A Pictorial Autobiography, Issue 69
Russian Roulette, Anne Boston on Lionel Davidson, Kolymsky Heights, Issue 60
High Adventure, Derek Robinson on Lionel Davidson, The Rose of Tibet, Issue 32

Other links

Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge
Jim Ede, A Way of Life: Kettle’s Yard is available from the Kettle’s Yard shop
King Charles, the then Prince of Wales, on Kettle’s Yard at their inaugural concert
Kettle’s Yard House Tour

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach

The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

45: Ronald Blythe: A Life Well Written

15 april 2023 | 60 min

‘I would like to be remembered as a good writer and a good man . . . Writers are observers. We are natural lookers, watchers . . . it seems to me quite wonderful that I have so long been able to make a living from something I love so much.’

So wrote the writer, editor and famed chronicler of rural life Ronald Blythe for the Mail on Sunday in 2004. That Ronald (or Ronnie, as he preferred to be known), who died aged 100 in early 2023, will be remembered as a good writer is irrefutable. Many Slightly Foxed listeners will know and love not only Akenfield – his bestselling 1969 portrait of a fictionalized East Anglian village – and the ‘Word from Wormingford’ column for the Church Times but also his unparalleled collection of short stories, poems, histories, novels and essays and, most recently, his year-long diary published as Next to Nature, which celebrates the slow perpetual turn of the farming year, the liturgical calendar and the rhythms of village life.

In this episode Ronnie’s fellow writers and friends, Julia Blackburn and his biographer Ian Collins, lead us down the rough-hewn track to the ancient yeoman’s cottage he inherited from the artist John Nash and into the nooks and crannies of his private world, tracing a life well lived and well written. We meet the changeling boy obsessed with books and nature and the self-taught youth whose good looks and charisma caused queues at the Colchester Library reference desk where he worked until he was discovered by the painter Christine Nash. It was she, recognizing his rare talent, who insisted he leave his job to pursue writing fulltime. We track Ronnie’s rich literary life path through his friends’ personal recollections, touching on tales of mid-winter meetings with E. M. Forster and an unlikely tryst with Patricia Highsmith. We muse on his spirituality and sexuality, his great love for life and his deep connection to the rural world with all its harshness and all its beauty, before heading for Bottengoms Farm where we hear how this great man and great writer saw out his last days in the company of good books and close friends.

For our book-lovers’ day out we head to the quintessential English cottage of Ronnie’s hero, the poet and keen gardener John Clare. And, to finish, a round-up of book recommendations including another East Anglian delight in Adrian Bell’s A Countryman’s Spring Notebook, an unusual fishing memoir by the writer of the Killing Eve series that’s about much more than just fishing, and the intricately plotted revenge tale No Name by Wilkie Collins, one of Ronnie’s favourite writers.

Books mentioned
We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Jess in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.

Subscribe to Slightly Foxed magazine
Ronald Blythe, Akenfield (0:19)
Ian Collins, Water Marks: Art in East Anglia is out of print (1:30)
Julia Blackburn, The Emperor’s Last Island is out of print (2:22)
Edna O’Brien, The Country Girls Trilogy (21.59)
Ronald Blythe, The Age of Illusion: England in the Twenties and Thirties, 1919-1940 is out of print (24:18)
Ronald Blythe, The View in Winter: Reflections on Old Age (31:06)
Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death (31:38)
Adrian Bell, Corduroy (37:30)
Ronald Blythe, Word from Wormingford (41:38)
Ronald Blythe, Next to Nature (43:36)
Nicholas Fisk, Pig Ignorant (52:54)
Adrian Bell, A Countryman’s Spring Notebook (53:59)
Luke Jennings, Blood Knots (54:11)
Luke Jennings, Codename Villanelle (54:13)
Annie Ernaux, The Years (55:15)
Wilkie Collins, No Name (55:47)
A. N. Wilson, Confessions (56:51)

Julia Blackburn gave the eulogy for Ronald Blythe at his funeral which took place at St Edmundsbury Cathedral, Bury St Edmunds on 1 March 2023. She has kindly given us permission to share the full transcript.

Related Slightly Foxed articles & podcast episodes

Mellow Fruitfulness, Melissa Harrison on Ronald Blythe’s Wormingford books, Issue 40
Light Reading, Ronald Blythe on pocket-size volumes, Issue 17
A Private, Circumspect People, Maggie Fergusson on Ronald Blythe, Akenfield, Issue 11
Where There’s a Will, Andrew Lycett on Wilkie Collins, No Name, Issue 48 (56:29)
Episode 38 of the Slightly Foxed podcast: Adrian Bell: Back to the Land (53:59)
Episode 42 of the Slightly Foxed podcast: Jean Rhys: Voyages in the Dark (59:30)

Other links

John Clare Cottage, Helpston (50:20)

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach

The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

44: Jean Rhys: Voyages in the Dark

15 januari 2023 | 60 min

The writer Jean Rhys is best known for Wide Sargasso Sea, her haunting prequel to Jane Eyre, yet her own life would have made for an equally compelling novel.

Miranda Seymour, author of the definitive Jean Rhys biography I Used to Live Here Once, joins the Slightly Foxed team to follow Rhys’s often rackety life and shine light on her writing. Born Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams on the island of Dominica, she dreamed of being an actress. And she did play many roles over the years: raconteur, recluse, wife (three times), grieving mother, enthusiastic drinker . . . But her most important role was that of a writer.

We begin in the Caribbean with Smile Please, Rhys’s unfinished autobiography of her early years, where we meet a white creole girl who feels like an outsider. This feeling lingers, whether she is living in squalid London, on Paris’s Left Bank or in rural Devon. The women in her novels feel it too: Anna adrift in London in Voyage in the Dark, Julia leaving Paris in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Antoinette bound for Mr Rochester’s attic in Wide Sargasso Sea. The voice of Sacha rings out in a BBC radio play of Good Morning, Midnight many years after its publication, bringing Rhys into the spotlight. Embezzlement, incarcerations, fisticuffs in the street and an unsuccessful menage à trois all trouble her at times, yet she wins over many supporters along the way, among them the writer Ford Madox Ford, the editors Francis Wyndham and Diana Athill, and her loyal friend Sonia Orwell.

Then we’re back in Paris, browsing the shelves of the Shakespeare and Company bookshop, and selecting some New Year reading recommendations – post-apocalyptic science fiction by John Christopher, travels Along the Enchanted Way in Romania, and the artistic life of Alison vividly told in words and pictures by Lizzy Stewart.

Books Mentioned
We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Jess in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.

Subscribe to Slightly Foxed magazine
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (0:14)
Miranda Seymour, I Used to Live Here Once (0:36)
Jean Rhys, Smile Please (2:48)
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (8:10)
Jean Rhys, The Collected Short Stories, which includes the stories mentioned in this episode: ‘Let Them Call it Jazz’; ‘Vienne’; ‘Till September Petronella’; ‘I Spy a Stranger’ and many more besides (9:31)
Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark (12:00)
Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (13:47)
Jean Rhys, Quartet (22:05)
Ford Madox Ford, When the Wicked Man is out of print (22:12)
Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight (34:34)
Jean Rhys, ‘I Spy a Stranger’ can be found in The Collected Short Stories (46:04)
John Christopher, The Death of Grass(53:17)
William Blacker, Along the Enchanted Way (55:00)
Lizzy Stewart, Alison (57:55)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles

Voyage in the Dark, Patricia Cleveland-Peck on the novels of Jean Rhys, Issue 4
Not-so-gay Paree, Rowena Macdonald on Jean Rhys, Quartet and Voyage in the Dark, Issue 51
Episode 38 of the Slightly Foxed podcast: Literary Drinking (29:40)
Episode 42 of the Slightly Foxed podcast: Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure (55:25)

Other Links

Shakespeare and Company, Paris (48:45)

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach

The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

43: Dinner with Joseph Johnson

15 oktober 2022 | 60 min

Bookseller, publisher, Dissenter and dinner-party host, Joseph Johnson was a great enabler in the late 18th-century literary landscape . . .

Daisy Hay is the author of Dinner with Joseph Johnson: Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age and Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Exeter, and Kathryn Sutherland is the author of Why Modern Manuscript Matters and Senior Research Fellow in English at the University of Oxford. Together they join the Slightly Foxed editors to discuss Joseph Johnson’s life and work at St Paul’s Churchyard, the heart of England’s book trade since medieval times.

We listen to the conversation around Johnson’s dining-table as Coleridge and Wordsworth, Joseph Priestley and Benjamin Franklin, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Blake debate the great issues of the day. And we watch as Johnson embarks on a career that will become the foundation stone of modern publishing. We hear how he takes on Olaudah Equiano’s memoir of enslavement and champions Anna Barbauld’s books for children, how he argues with William Cowper over copyright and how he falls foul of bookshop spies and is sent to prison. From Johnson’s St Paul’s we then travel to Mayfair, where John Murray II is hosting literary salons with Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott, and taking a chance on Jane Austen. To complete our tour, we glimpse the anatomy experiments in the basement of Benjamin Franklin’s house by the Strand.

Our round-up of book recommendations includes Konstantin Paustovsky’s The Story of a Life which begins in Ukraine, Winifred Holtby’s conversations with Wollstonecraft and Woolf, a fresh look at Jane Austen’s Emma and an evocation of the Aldeburgh coast as we visit Ronald Blythe for tea.

Books Mentioned
We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Jess in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.

Colin Clark, The Prince, the Showgirl and Me, Slightly Foxed Edition No. 61 (1:23)
Edward Ardizzone, The Young Ardizzone, Plain Foxed Edition (2:01)
Daisy Hay, Dinner with Joseph Johnson: Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age (2:52)
Kathryn Sutherland, Why Modern Manuscripts Matter
William Cowper, The Task (15:46)
William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is out of print (24:09)
John Knowles, The Life and Writing of Henry Fuseli is out of print (24:12)
Mary Scott, The Female Advocate; a poem occasioned by reading Mr. Duncombe’s Feminead is out of print (27:36)
Slightly Foxed Cubs series of children’s books (31:52)
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (35:53)
Maria Rundell, Mrs Rundell’s Domestic Cookery is out of print (46:01)
Konstantin Paustovsky, The Story of a Life, translated by Douglas Smith (50:52)
Joanna Quinn, The Whalebone Theatre (52:40)
Jane Austen, Emma (53:16)
Winifred Holtby, Women and a Changing Civilisation is out of print (54:07)
Winifred Holtby, Virginia Woolf: A Critical Memoir is out of print (54:44)
Winifred Holtby, South Riding (55:46)
Ronald Blythe, The Time by the Sea (56:46)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles

Letters from the Heart, Daisy Hay on Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, Issue 51
Just Getting on with It, A. F. Harrold on William Cowper, Selected Poems, Issue 23
The Abyss Beyond the Orchard, Alexandra Harris on William Cowper, The Centenary Letters, Issue 53
‘By God, I’m going to spin’, Paul Routledge on the novels of Winifred Holtby, Issue 32

Other Links

Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare (11:42)
Dr Johnson’s House, City of London (49:52)
Benjamin Franklin House, Charing Cross, London (49:56)

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach

The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

42: Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure

15 juli 2022 | 60 min

Paddy Leigh Fermor was just 18 when he set forth from the Hook of Holland, bound for the Golden Horn . . .

Artemis Cooper, Paddy’s biographer, and Nick Hunt, author of Walking the Woods and the Water, join the Slightly Foxed team to explore the life and literary work of Patrick Leigh Fermor.

Equipped with a gift for languages, a love of Byron and a rucksack full of notebooks, in December 1933 Paddy set off on foot to follow the course of the Rhine and the Danube, walking hundreds of miles. Years later he recorded much of the journey in A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. In these books Baroque architecture and noble bloodlines abound, but adventure is at the heart of his writing. There was to have been a third volume, but for years Paddy struggled with it. Only after his death were Artemis and Colin Thubron able to see The Broken Road into print.

The trilogy inspired Nick Hunt to follow in Paddy’s footsteps. What were country lanes are now highways, and many names have changed, but Nick found places that Paddy had visited, with their echoes of times past.

Following discussions of a love affair with a Romanian princess, Paddy’s role in the Cretan resistance in the Second World War and Caribbean volcanoes in The Violins of Saint-Jacques, we turn our focus to his books on the Greek regions of Roumeli and the Mani, and the beautiful house that Paddy and his wife Joan built in the latter, Kardamyli. And via our reading recommendations we travel from Calcutta to Kabul In a Land Far from Home, to William Trevor’s Ireland and to Cal Flynn’s Islands of Abandonment.

Books Mentioned
We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Jess in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.

Nella Last’s War, Slightly Foxed Edition No. 60 (1:12)
Graham Greene, A Sort of Life, Plain Foxed Edition (1:18)
Artemis Cooper, Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure (2:32)
Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water (4:15)
Nick Hunt, Walking the Woods and the Water (6:52)
Patrick Leigh Fermor, The Broken Road, edited by Artemis Cooper and Colin Thubron (23:05)
Patrick Leigh Fermor, Three Letters from the Andes (24:23)
W. Stanley Moss, Ill Met by Moonlight (34:31)
George Psychoundakis, The Cretan Runner (38:25)
Patrick Leigh Fermor, The Traveller’s Tree is out of print (40:06)
Simon Fenwick, Joan: Beauty, Rebel, Muse: The Remarkable Life of Joan Leigh Fermor (41:11)
Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time to Keep Silence (43:24)
Patrick Leigh Fermor, The Violins of Saint-Jacques (43:27)
Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani (46:27)
Patrick Leigh Fermor, Roumeli (46:31)
Robert Macfarlane, The Gifts of Reading, inspired by A Time of Gifts
Syed Mujtaba Ali, In a Land Far from Home (49:05)
Taran Khan, Shadow City (51:21)
Eugenie Fraser, The House by the Dvina (51:44)
Cal Flynn, Islands of Abandonment (53:49)
William Trevor, Fools of Fortune (55:33)
Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September (56:10)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles

A Great Adventure, Andy Merrills on Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts; Between the Woods and the Water, Issue 38 (4:15)
Off All the Standard Maps, Tim Mackintosh-Smith on Patrick Leigh Fermor, Roumeli, Issue 2 (46:31)

Other Links

Artemis Cooper’s website: www.artemiscooper.com
Nick Hunt’s website: www.nickhuntscrutiny.com
Siân Phillips reads from A Time of Gifts
Read two extracts from A Time of Gifts: Dropping anchor at the Hook of Holland and The largest Gothic cathedral in Northern Europe
‘When I first read A Time of Gifts I felt it in my feet’: Robert Macfarlane reads from The Gifts of Reading
The Leigh Fermor House in Kardamyli, Greece – Benaki Museum
Artemis Cooper on the Leigh Fermor House, Condé Nast Traveller

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach

The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

41: Barbara Pym and Other Excellent Women

15 april 2022 | 57 min

A latter-day Austen, an academic, a romantic, a comic, a caustic chronicler of the commonplace . . . The novelist Barbara Pym became beloved and Booker Prize-nominated in the late twentieth century, yet many rejections, years in the literary wilderness and manuscripts stored in linen cupboards preceded her revival.

Paula Byrne, author of The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym, and Lucy Scholes, critic, Paris Review columnist and editor at McNally Editions, join the Slightly Foxed team to plumb the depths and scale the peaks of Barbara Pym’s writing, life and loves. From Nazi Germany to the African Institute; from London’s bedsit land to parish halls; from unrequited love affairs with unsuitable men to an epistolary friendship with Philip Larkin; and from rejection by Jonathan Cape to overnight success via the TLS, we trace Pym’s life through her novels, visiting the Bodleian and Boots lending libraries along the way. There’s joy in Some Tame Gazelle, loneliness in Quartet in Autumn, and humour and all human experience in between, with excellent women consistently her theme.

We then turn from Pym to other writers under or above the radar, finding darkness in Elizabeth Taylor, tragicomedy in Margaret Kennedy and real and surreal rackety lives in Barbara Comyns. To round out a cast of excellent women, we discover Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca was foretold in Elizabeth von Arnim’s Vera, and we recommend an eccentric trip with Jane Bowles and her Two Serious Ladies, as well as theatrical tales from a raconteur in Eileen Atkins’s memoir. (Episode duration: 57 minutes; 16 seconds)

Books Mentioned
We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Jess in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.

Flora Thompson, Lark Rise and Over to Candleford & Candleford Green, Slightly Foxed Edition Nos. 58 and 59 (1:39)
Paula Byrne, The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym (2:11)
Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow is out of print (4:28)
Barbara Pym, Quartet in Autumn (6:33)
Barbara Pym, The Sweet Dove Died is out of print (8:16)
Barbara Pym, Some Tame Gazelle (14:07)
Barbara Pym, Excellent Women (19:06)
Barbara Pym, A Glass of Blessings (22:14)
Barbara Pym, A Few Green Leaves is out of print (32:28)
Nicola Beauman, The Other Elizabeth Taylor (36:33)
Elizabeth Taylor, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (37:00)
Elizabeth Taylor, Angel (38:27)
Barbara Comyns, The Vet’s Daughter (41:16)
Barbara Comyns, The House of Dolls (42:16)
Barbara Comyns, Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (42:45)
Barbara Comyns, Our Spoons Came from Woolworths (43:03)
Barbara Comyns, A Touch of Mistletoe (43:46)
Elizabeth von Arnim, Vera (47:47)
Margaret Kennedy, Troy Chimneys, McNally Editions (48:59)
Jane Bowles, Two Serious Ladies (50:37)
Eileen Atkins, Will She Do? (52:39)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles

Not So Bad, Really, Frances Donnelly on Barbara Pym, Issue 11
Hands across the Tea-shop Table, Sue Gee on Elizabeth Taylor, A Game of Hide and Seek and Nicola Beauman, The Other Elizabeth Taylor, Issue 58
There for the Duration, Juliet Gardiner on Elizabeth Taylor, At Mrs Lippincote’s, Issue 13
Sophia Fairclough and Me, Sophie Breese on the novels of Barbara Comyns, Issue 42

Other Links

McNally Editions is an American imprint devoted to hidden gems (2:47)
In the Paris Review Re-Covered column, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be
Lucy Scholes is the host of the Virago OurShelves podcast
The Barbara Pym Society

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach

The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

40: Adrian Bell: Back to the Land

15 februari 2022 | 42 min

The farmer-cum-writer Adrian Bell is best-known for his rural trilogy of Suffolk farming life, Corduroy, Silver Ley and The Cherry Tree. To explore Bell’s life and writing the Slightly Foxed editors are joined by Richard Hawking, chairman of the Adrian Bell Society, author of At the Field’s Edge: Adrian Bell and the English Countryside and editor of A Countryman’s Winter Notebook, a selection of Bell’s newspaper columns.

We follow Bell from middle-class London to a farming apprenticeship in Suffolk, where his inability to do the most basic physical tasks taught him a new respect. A farmer, he discovered, held in his head thousands of facts about animals, crops and fodder, while his eye for a pig was ‘as subtle as an artist’s’. As Bell grappled with life on the land, the locals considered him to be a recuperating invalid or an incompetent idiot but in time he grew into a bona fide countryman, one who criticized Thomas Hardy’s portrayal of the ploughman as ‘only a man harrowing clods’ and who managed to set up his own small farm, Silver Ley.

From the pride of the wagon maker, the repeal of the corn act in the 1920s and the heartbreak of farmers going bankrupt to his bohemian mother making butter, his friend John Nash illustrating Men and the Fields and Second World War soldiers packing Corduroy in their kit bags, we learn that Bell is the perfect writer to reconnect people with the land, one whose work still feels relevant today. As his close friend Ronald Blythe noted, Bell was ‘in love with words’, a love that led to his position as the founder of The Times cryptic crossword.

And in our usual round-up of recommended reading we enter Walter de la Mare’s dreams, explore Shackleton’s Antarctica and visit Catherine Fox’s fictional Lindchester, the setting for her glorious twenty-first-century Trollopian tales. (Episode duration: 42 minutes; 18 seconds)

Books Mentioned
We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Jess in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.

Flora Thompson, Lark Rise, Slightly Foxed Edition No. 58 (0:55)
Flora Thompson, Over to Candleford & Candleford Green, Slightly Foxed Edition No. 59 will be published on 1 June and is available to order now.
Richard Hawking, At the Field’s Edge: Adrian Bell and the English Countryside (2:28)
Adrian Bell, A Countryman’s Winter Notebook. A Slightly Foxed special release with an introduction by Richard Hawking and specially commissioned illustrations by Suffolk artist Beth Knight (2:30)
Adrian Bell, Men and the Fields (4:23)
Adrian Bell, Corduroy, Plain Foxed Edition (4:54)
Adrian Bell, Silver Ley is currently out of print
Adrian Bell, The Cherry Tree, Slightly Foxed Edition No. 38 (6:46)
Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War (7:08)
Ann Gander, Adrian Bell: Voice of the Countryside is out of print (16:56)
Walter Rose, The Village Carpenter is out of print (18:20)
Adrian Bell, The Open Air: An Anthology of English Country Life is out of print (18:53)
Adrian Bell, My Own Master is out of print (22:52)
Adrian Bell, Sunrise to Sunset is out of print (23:27)
Adrian Bell, The Flower and the Wheel is out of print (26:26)
James Rebanks, English Pastoral (30:06)
Catherine Fox, Acts and Omissions (33:06)
Walter de la Mare, Behold, This Dreamer! (34:52)
William Grill, Shackleton’s Journey and Bandoola: The Great Elephant Rescue (36:21)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles

Winter Noon, extract from Adrian Bell, A Countryman’s Winter Notebook
Another Country, Christian Tyler on Adrian Bell, Corduroy, Issue 22
From the Farmhouse Window, Melissa Harrison on Adrian Bell, Silver Ley, Issue 46
Ploughing On, Hazel Wood on Adrian Bell, The Cherry Tree, Issue 54
How long had I been standing here under the old cherry tree?, extract from Adrian Bell, The Cherry Tree

Other Links

The Adrian Bell Society (2:25)
www.ruralmuseums.org.uk (30:57)

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach

The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

39: Idle Moments: Literary Loafers through the Ages and Pages

15 januari 2022 | 47 min

In the spirit of Plato’s Symposium, the Slightly Foxed team enter into lively dialogue with two distinguished magazine editors, Tom Hodgkinson of the Idler and Harry Mount of the Oldie, and learn lessons from notable loafers in literature. We begin with Doctor Johnson, an icon of indolence who wrote an essay called ‘The Idler’ and liked time to ponder; this lazy lexicographer claimed his dictionary would take three years to write when in fact it would take nine . . .

The wisdom-loving philosophers of Ancient Greece made a case for carving out leisure time, while the anchorite Julian of Norwich favoured a life of seclusion in which ‘all shall be well’. At the age of thirty-eight Michel de Montaigne retired to a grand book-filled chateau to test out ideas in essays, while George Orwell wrote book reviews in hungover misery. Izaak Walton found contemplation in The Compleat Angler and Jerome K. Jerome found humour in Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, while the autodidactic Mitford sisters sought wild freedom.

We enjoy a leisurely spell with loungers in fiction, visiting Lady Bertram and her pug in Mansfield Park, taking to Lady Diana Cooper’s bed in A Handful of Dust, retreating to Aunt Ada Doom’s room in Cold Comfort Farm, settling into the quiet comfort of Mycroft Holmes’s Diogenes Club and meeting Thomas Love Peacock’s Honourable Mr Listless along the way. And, to finish, there are the usual wide-ranging reading recommendations for when you have an idle moment. (Episode duration: 46 minutes; 56 seconds)

Books Mentioned
We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Jess in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.

Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler (9:49)
Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays (11:48)
Sarah Bakewell, How to Live (13:05)
Plato, Symposium (17:51)
Janina Ramirez, Julian of Norwich (18:58)
Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust (26:53)
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (28:21)
Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat; Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow is out of print (29:44)
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy will be available in a new edition in July 2022 (32:29)
Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm (34:41)
Geoffrey Willans, The Lost Diaries of Nigel Molesworth is out of print (39:51)
Gamel Woolsey, Death’s Other Kingdom (40:40)
Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey (42:29)
David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything (43:28)
Jane Smiley, The Strays of Paris (46:56)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles

‘Study to be quiet’, Ken Haigh on Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler, Issue 54 (9:49)
The Great Self-Examiner, Anthony Wells on the essays of Michel de Montaigne, Issue 69 (11:48)
Poste-Freudian Therapy, Michele Hanson on Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm, Issue 10 (34:41)
Peacock’s Progress, J. W. M. Thompson on Thomas Love Peacock, Headlong Hall; Crotchet Castle, Issue 5 (42:29)

Other Links

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach

The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

38: Literary Drinking: Alcohol in the Lives and Work of Writers

15 december 2021 | 41 min

Booze as muse or a sure road to ruin? In this month’s episode, William Palmer – author of In Love with Hell: Drink in the Lives and Work of Eleven Writers – and Henry Jeffreys – author of Empire of Booze and The Cocktail Dictionary – join the Slightly Foxed team to mull over why alcohol is such an enduring feature in literature.

From the omnipresence of cocktails in John Cheever’s short stories and ritual aperitifs in Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels to Mr Picksniff falling into Mrs Todger’s fireplace in Martin Chuzzlewit and P. G. Wodehouse’s hangover remedies for booze-soaked Bertie Wooster, drinks are social signifiers in fiction. Charles Dickens was fond of sherry cobblers and Jean Rhys knocked back Pernod in Paris, while Malcolm Lowry was a dipsomaniac and Flann O’Brien dreamed up alcoholic ink for the Irish Times, rendering readers drunk from fumes. We ask why gin denotes despair and port is always jovial, and question whether hitting the bottle helps or hinders the creative process in writers.

Following a convivial sherry, we’re whisked away on a wet-your-whistle-stop tour of drinking dens with our friends at London Literary Tours, barrelling from bars propped up by Oscar Wilde to the follies of Dylan Thomas at Soho’s French House via Ian Fleming’s Vesper cocktail at Dukes. And we finish with a final round of reading recommendations, visiting a whisky distillery in Pakistan in Lawrence Osbourne’s The Wet and the Dry, enjoying Happy Hour with Marlowe Granados and stopping for a nightcap at Kingsley Amis’s ghostly local The Green Man.

(Episode duration: 41 minutes; 16 seconds)

Books Mentioned
We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Jess in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.

Anne Fadiman, The Wine Lover’s Daughter, Slightly Foxed Edition No. 57 (1:39)
William Palmer, In Love with Hell: Drink in the Lives and Work of Eleven Writers (2:24)
Henry Jeffreys, Empire of Booze (2:33)
Henry Jeffreys, The Cocktail Dictionary
Dylan Thomas, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (3:41)
Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking (4:45)
Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman (6:40)
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (11:16)
Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight (11:49)
Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr Ripley (12:17)
Patricia Highsmith, Diaries and Notebooks
Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (14:54)
Edward St Aubyn, The Patrick Melrose Novels (17:03)
Douglas Stuart, Shuggie Bain (19:01)
Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit (20:42)
John Cheever, Collected Stories (23:26)
Jeremy Lewis, Kindred Spirits (26:05)
Ladybird Books: What to Look For in . . . Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter (33:05)
Kingsley Amis, The Green Man (35:13)
Lawrence Osbourne, The Wet and the Dry (36:45)
Marlowe Granados, Happy Hour (38:27)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles

The Smoking Bishop, William Palmer on drinking and drunkenness in Dickens, Issue 16 (8:52)
On the Randy Again, William Palmer on Dylan Thomas, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, Issue 30 (3:41)
Cheers!, Henry Jeffreys on Bernard DeVoto, The Hour & Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking, Issue 68 (4:45)
A Quare One, Patrick Welland on the novels of Flann O’Brien, Issue 41 (6:40)
Voyage in the Dark, Patricia Cleveland-Peck on the novels of Jean Rhys, Issue 4 (10:22)
With a Notebook and a Ukelele, Gordon Bowker on the stories of Malcolm Lowry, Issue 37 (19:46)
A Visit from God, William Palmer on Kingsley Amis, The Green Man, Issue 20 (35:09)

Other Links

London Literary Tours (28.00)

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach

The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

37: Rewriting the Script: The short life and blazing art of Sylvia Plath with her acclaimed biographer Heather Clark

15 november 2021 | 49 min

Heather Clark, Professor of Contemporary Poetry at the University of Huddersfield and author of the award-winning biography Red Comet, joins the Slightly Foxed team from New York to dispel the myths that have come to surround Sylvia Plath’s life and art.

Tired of the cliché of the hysterical female writer, and of the enduring focus on Plath’s death rather than her trailblazing poetry and fiction, Clark used a wealth of new material – including juvenilia, unpublished letters and manuscripts, and psychiatric records – to explore Plath’s literary landscape. She conjures the spirit of the star English student at Smith College who won a Fulbright scholarship to Cambridge University and who brought her enormous appetite for life to her writing and relationships. We follow her life from the ‘mad passionate abandon’ of her thunderclap meeting with Ted Hughes, rebellion against genteel verse and her creation of a dark ‘potboiler’ in The Bell Jar to her belief that a full literary life and a family unit can coexist and the outpouring of first-rate poems fuelled by rage in her final days. She introduced female anger and energy into the poetic lexicon with ‘Lady Lazarus’, ‘Daddy’, ‘Ariel’ and more; poems that were considered shocking at the time, but which are now regarded as masterpieces.

And there are more biographies to be found in our round-up of reading recommendations – of renegade anthropologists and female abstract expressionists – as well as a relationship between a father and his young son told through illustrated letters that leap off the page in Letters to Michael, with wonderful readings by the actor Nigel Anthony. (Episode duration: 48 minutes; 48 seconds)

Books Mentioned
We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Jess in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.

Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
The Letters of Sylvia Plath Vol. I: 1940-1956
The Letters of Sylvia Plath Vol. II: 1956-1963
Sylvia Plath, Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices, a radio play (23:28)
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (30:16)
Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition (39:23)
Sylvia Plath, The Colossus
Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes
Lucie Elven, The Weak Spot (41:55)
Charles King, Gods of the Upper Air is not currently available in the UK (43:44)
Lily King, Euphoria (44:06)
Mary Gabriel, Ninth Street Women (44:15)
Charles Phillipson, Letters to Michael: a father writes to his son 1945–1947. With thanks to the actor Nigel Anthony for the readings. (45:19)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles & Podcasts

Slightly Foxed Podcast Episode 29: A Poet’s Haven. Dr Mark Wormald, a scholar on the life and writings of Ted Hughes, on the Barrie Cooke archive

Other Links

Heather Clark’s website
Heather Clark wins The Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2020 for Red Comet
Listen to the 1961 BBC Interview with Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (17:07)
Listen to the BBC Radio 3 Arts & Ideas podcast on Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Seamus Heaney (44:45)
The artist Heather Phillipson’s Sketches from Space Instagram account, where she first shared Charles Phillipson’s letters to Michael (45:38)
The National Poetry Library, Southbank Centre, London (47:31)

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach

The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

36: Graphic Novels: A Comic Turn with Posy Simmonds & Paul Gravett

15 oktober 2021 | 45 min

The cartoonist, writer and illustrator Posy Simmonds brilliantly captures the ambitions and pretensions of the literary world, and the journalist and curator Paul Gravett has worked in comics publishing for decades. Together they bring graphic novels and comic books to the foreground with the Slightly Foxed team. We draw moral lessons from the Ally Sloper cartoons of the 1870s, glimpse Frans Masereel’s wordless woodcut stories of the 1920s, view the pictorial politics of Citizen 13660 by Miné Okubo in the 1940s and revisit Art Spiegelman’s 1992 Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus before taking a closer look at more contemporary works.

From a tragicomic summer with Joff Winterhart, nuclear explosions with Raymond Briggs, the shadow of James Joyce with Mary and Bryan Talbot and an Iranian childhood with Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, the discussion moves through panels, frames, splashes and spreads to Posy Simmonds’s own methods in bringing literature to life, including crosshatching to Vivaldi. Originally serialized in the Guardian, Posy’s Gemma Bovery builds on the bones of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Tamara Drewe draws from Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, while Cassandra Darke takes inspiration from Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Though rooted in the classics, the devil is in Posy’s detail, be it real French coffee pots, the joy of characters’ names, such as Kevin Penwallet, and fictional places, such as Tresoddit.

We continue our travels off the beaten track with our usual round-up of reading recommendations, and a trip to Gilbert White’s House and Gardens in Hampshire, where we view the landscapes that sparked his evergreen classic The Natural History of Selborne. (Episode duration: 44 minutes; 39 seconds)

Books Mentioned
We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Jess in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.

Ally Sloper: A Moral Lesson, cartoons by Marie Duval and words by Judy’s office boy is out of print (4:48)
Miné Okubo, Citizen 13660 (6:29)
George Takei, They Called Us Enemy (7:25)
Jules Feiffer, Passionella and Other Stories is out of print (9:05)
Art Spiegelman, Maus (10:37)
Mary M. Talbot & Bryan Talbot, Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes (12:52)
Joff Winterhart, Days of the Bagnold Summer (13:22)
Raymond Briggs, When the Wind Blows (15:42)
Raymond Briggs, Ethel & Ernest (17:07)
Posy Simmonds, Gemma Bovery (17:48)
Posy Simmonds, Tamara Drewe (17:48)
Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis (28:31)
Posy Simmonds, Cassandra Darke (29:04)
Riad Sattouf, The Arab of the Future (30:24)
Alison Bechdel, Fun Home (31:20)
Posy Simmonds, Literary Life Revisited
Paul Gravett, Posy Simmonds
Emma Tennant, Burnt Diaries is out of print (34:20)
Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways (37:28)
Our Time, an anthology commissioned by The Lakes International Comic Art Festival (38:29)
Laurie Lee, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. Published in our series of Slightly Foxed Editions, along with Cider with Rosie (39:54)
Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne (41:24)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles & Illustrations

Underwear Was Important, Hazel Wood on the cartoons of Posy Simmonds, Issue 15
Cover illustration by Posy Simmonds, Issue 16
Inside cover illustration by Posy Simmonds, Issue 60
Touched with a Secret Delight, Melissa Harrison on Gilbert White, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, Issue 48

Other Links

Posy Simmonds Close Up, Cartoonmuseum Basel, Switzerland. The exhibition runs until 24 October 2021 (2:39)
The bd BOUM festival, Blois, France. The festival is chaired by Posy Simmonds and runs from 19-21 November 2021
Gosh! Comics, London, UK (31:58)
The Lakes International Comic Art Festival, Kendal, UK (32:08)
Thought Bubble, The Yorkshire Comic Convention, Harrogate, UK (32:26)
Gilbert White’s House & Gardens, Selborne, UK (41:13)

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach

The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

35: Decline and Fall: A Literary Guide

15 september 2021 | 43 min

The Dark Ages, Late Antiquity, the late Roman . . . however you define the years spanning the fall of Rome, the period is rich in stories, real or reimagined.

In this episode Dr Andy Merrills, Associate Professor of Ancient History, joins the Slightly Foxed team to cast light on the surviving literature. We begin with Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire before delving into 4th-century accounts by the Latin historian Ammianus Marcellinus, a spiritual autobiography by Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, ecclesiastical chronicles by the Venerable Bede, Gallic tales of Christian miracles and relic-looting with Gregory of Tours and an alternative look at the period with the modern-day master of Late Antiquity, Peter Brown.

From there we venture into fiction with Rosemary Sutcliff’s adventures inspired by archaeological finds and a retelling of the old British folk ballad ‘The Twa Sisters’ in Lucy Holland’s Sistersong, as well as Gore Vidal’s Julian and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant. We swap tales from Icelandic sagas and set sail on a tenth-century Viking long ship with Frans G. Bengtsson before heading beyond Hadrian’s Wall for a glimpse of the Lindisfarne Gospels on Holy Island and a hunt for second-hand gems at Barter Books in a converted Victorian railway station in Northumberland.

And there’s more historical fiction to be found in further reading recommendations too, as we plunge into the seventeenth-century Essex witch trials with poet A. K. Blakemore’s novel The Manningtree Witches and follow the fortunes of a group of friends in wartime Europe in Olivia Manning’s classic Balkan Trilogy. (Episode duration: 42 minutes; 49 seconds )

Books Mentioned
We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Jess in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.

A Countryman’s Winter Notebook, Adrian Bell (1:02)
Letters to Michael: a father writes to his son 1945–1947, Charles Phillipson (1:12)
The Rosemary Sutcliff Novels, Slightly Foxed Cubs. The final two in the series, The Shield Ring and Sword Song, are now available (2:00)
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon (4:18)
The Later Roman Empire, Ammianus Marcellinus (9:30)
The History of the Franks, Gregory of Tours (10:41)
Confessions, Saint Augustine (13:54)
City of God, Saint Augustine (14:46)
Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Bede (15:34)
The World of Late Antiquity, Peter Brown (17:34)
Julian, Gore Vidal (22:14)
The Dream of Scipio, Iain Pears (22:54)
The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro (23:38)
Dawn Wind, Rosemary Sutcliff (25:06)
The Long Ships, Frans G. Bengtsson (26:08)
Beowulf: A New Translation, Maria Dahvana Headley (27:13)
Sistersong, Lucy Holland (27:30)
Le Morte Darthur, Thomas Malory (30:53)
The Last Kingdom, Bernard Cornwell (32:11)
The Manningtree Witches, A. K. Blakemore (38:17)
The Balkan Trilogy, Olivia Manning (40:47)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles

Scaling Gibbon’s Everest, Richard Crockatt on Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Issue 68 (8:17)
A Frank Look at History, Andy Merrills on Gregory of Tours, The History of the Franks, Issue 65 (12:48)
Last of the Pagans, Patrick Welland on Gore Vidal, Julian, Issue 45 (22:50)
The Sound of Chariots, Sue Gaisford on the Roman Britain novels of Rosemary Sutcliff, Issue 63
Light in the Dark Ages, Sue Gaisford on Rosemary Sutcliff, Dawn Wind, Issue 69
Magical Talisman, Sue Gaisford on Rosemary Sutcliff, Sword Song & The Shield Ring, Issue 71
Adrift on the Tides of War, Patrick Welland on Olivia Manning’s Balkan trilogy, Issue 63 (40:47)

Other Links

Listen to Episode 18 of the Slightly Foxed Podcast: An Odyssey Through the Classics (0:20)
Barter Books, Alnwick (36:12)

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach

The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

34: Sybille Bedford’s Appetite for Life

15 augusti 2021 | 44 min

‘I wondered for a time who this brilliant “Mrs Bedford” could be,’ wrote Evelyn Waugh to Nancy Mitford on reading Sybille Bedford’s first novel, A Legacy.

The twentieth-century European writer Sybille Bedford could be many things: traveller, gourmand, oenophile, court reporter, Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist. In this month’s literary podcast the Slightly Foxed team discover the pleasures and landscapes of Bedford’s life, loves and writing with her biographer, Selina Hastings. The daughter of a German Baron, from childhood Bedford travelled endlessly, living in Germany, Italy, France, Portugal and Britain. Claiming to suffer from sloth and love of life, she deified her friend Aldous Huxley, had assets frozen by the Nazi regime, was funded by Martha Gellhorn and was known for her many lovers, all while experiencing the ‘tearing, crushing, defeating agony’ of writing. From a delicious account of a visit to Don Otavio in Mexico and vivid reportage of the Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscenity trial to the autobiographical novel Jigsaw, we see the world through Bedford’s observant eye and voracious appetite.

And we continue our travels with a trip to the Heath Robinson Museum in London, exploring the cartoonist’s imagination through electric egg poachers, Christmas cracker-pulling machines and other curious contraptions, before sharing reading recommendations for Italo Calvino’s short stories that follow the cycle of the seasons, and an enlightening experiment with fiction from Francis Spufford. (Episode duration: 43 minutes; 56 seconds)

Books Mentioned
We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Jess in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.

Sybille Bedford: An Appetite for Life, Selina Hastings
A Visit to Don Otavio, Sybille Bedford (12:00)
A Legacy, Sybille Bedford (17:41)
The Best We Can Do, Sybille Bedford is out of print (21:23)
The Trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Sybille Bedford (21:33)
Jigsaw, Sybille Bedford (28:51)
Aldous Huxley: A Biography, Sybille Bedford is out of print (29:40)
Very Heath Robinson, Adam Hart-Davis (38:34)
Marcovaldo, Italo Calvino (39:10)
Light Perpetual, Francis Spufford (41:02)

Other available books by Sybille Bedford

Related Slightly Foxed Articles

Bruised, Shocked, but Elated, Selina Hastings on Sybille Bedford, A Visit to Don Otavio, Issue 69 (12:00)
A Bath with a View, Caroline Chapman on Sybille Bedford, A Legacy, Issue 38 (17:41)

Other Links

Listen to Selina Hastings on Episode 18 of the Slightly Foxed Podcast: The Ordeal of Evelyn Waugh (0:54)
Sybille Bedford on Desert Island Discs, recorded in 1998 (9.09)
Heath Robinson Museum (36:20)

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach

The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

33: The Golden Age of Crime Writing

15 juli 2021 | 45 min

Diamond Dagger award-winning crime novelist and president of the Detection Club Martin Edwards and Richard Reynolds, crime buyer for Heffers Bookshop and member of the Crime Writers’ Association, lead our investigation in this month’s literary podcast. Together with the Slightly Foxed team, they take a magnifying glass to the Golden Age of crime fiction, tracing its origins to the interwar years when the Detection Club was founded and discussing why the genre continues to thrill.

From relishing The Poisoned Chocolates Case and resurrecting Death of a Bookseller to the mystery of E. C. R. Lorac’s missing manuscript and meeting Baroness Orczy’s Teahouse Detective, the plot twists and turns as we collect British Library Crime Classics and celebrate Crime Queens Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Josephine Tey and others along the way. Whether enjoyed as well-crafted puzzles, social documents or guilty pleasures, detective fiction is laced with nostalgia as well as cyanide. To tie up loose ends, we finish with a visit to Agatha Christie’s holiday home, Greenway, a house fit for Hercule Poirot, and the setting of a Devonshire murder hunt in Dead Man’s Folly.

Please find links to books, articles, and further reading listed below. The digits in brackets following each listing refer to the minute and second they are mentioned. (Episode duration: 44 minutes; 56 seconds)

Books Mentioned
We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Jess in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.

Mortmain Hall and The Crooked Shore, Martin Edwards
The Murder at the Vicarage, Agatha Christie (3.57)
The Nine Tailors, Dorothy L. Sayers. (4.29)
The Red House Mystery, A. A. Milne (9.31)
The Old Man in the Corner, Baroness Orczy (10.34)
A Question of Proof, Nicholas Blake (12:09)
The Cask, Freeman Wills Crofts (14.02)
Lord Peter Wimsey, Dorothy L. Sayers (15:00)
Cards on the Table, Agatha Christie (15.39)
Francis Vivian’s Inspector Knollis Mysteries, published by Dean Street Press (15:58)
Tragedy at Law, Cyril Hare (16:53)
Thrones, Dominations, Dorothy L. Sayers and Jill Paton Walsh (18.03)
Anthony Gilbert’s Arthur Crook novels (19.09)
Portrait of a Murderer, Anne Meredith (19.38)
Bloodshed in Bayswater, John Rowland is out of print (21.38)
Death of a Bookseller, Bernard J. Farmer is due to be published in a British Library Crime Classics edition in 2022 (21:41)
A Surprise for Christmas and Other Seasonal Mysteries and Murder at the Manor: Country House Mysteries, Ed. Martin Edwards (22:35)
Two-Way Murder, E. C. L. Lorac (33.40)
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie (35.15)
Verdict of Twelve, Raymond Postgate (35.25)
And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie (35.57)
Arrest the Bishop, Winifred Peck, published by Dean Street Press (37.56)
The Poisoned Chocolates Case, Anthony Berkeley (38.42)
The Dry, Jane Harper (40.05)
Agatha Christie: A Biography, Janet Morgan (41.03)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles

Murder Most Civilized, Emma Hogan on Agatha Christie, the Miss Marple books, Issue 17
Vane Hopes, Victoria Neumark on the novels of Dorothy L. Sayers, Issue 32
Hauntings, Michèle Roberts on Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night, Issue 63
A Gentleman on the Case, Brandon Robshaw on Margery Allingham, the Albert Campion novels, Issue 52
The Judge’s Progress, P. D. James on Cyril Hare, Tragedy at Law, Issue 12
Lost in the Fens, Julie Welch on the detective stories of Edmund Crispin, Issue 63

Other Links

British Library Crime Classics (22:36)
Dean Street Press (30:40)
Download Heffers Crime Fiction Top 100, selected by Richard Reynolds. NB The file will download automatically on click. Please check your downloads folder (35:12)
Agatha Christie’s holiday home, Greenway, in Devon (42:37)

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach

The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

32: Picnic at Hanging Rock & Other Stories

15 juni 2021 | 44 min

‘Whether Picnic at Hanging Rock is fact or fiction, my readers must decide for themselves.’ It’s a scorching St Valentine’s Day in 1900 when three boarding-school girls and a teacher disappear during a day-trip to Hanging Rock in the arid Australian outback. Fact or fiction? Misadventure or murder? Accident or assassination? Join us on our latest literary podcast adventure as we delve into the mystery, history and hysteria of Joan Lindsay’s classic Australian Gothic novel with Kate Young, author of The Little Library Cookbook. From the slow-seeping horror of Hanging Rock to coming-of-age tales of tuck boxes and midnight feasts, high jinks and humour, Kate guides the Slightly Foxed magazine team through the school-story tradition and asks why it’s such fertile ground for fiction. On the way we visit the Chalet School, Malory Towers and St Trinian’s, and slip into darker territory with Decline and Fall, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.

In this month’s literary expedition, we take a peek inside Quentin Blake’s House of Illustration, and to finish there’s the usual wide-ranging round-up of current reading featuring: Anthony Buckeridge’s classic Jennings series of prep-school stories; Emily Danforth’s romp, Plain Bad Heroines, inspired by Shirley Jackson; and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s tale of a young girl from a rural village in Zimbabwe, Nervous Conditions.

Please find links to books, articles, and further reading listed below. The digits in brackets following each listing refer to the minute and second they are mentioned. (Episode duration: 44 minutes; 24 seconds)

Books Mentioned
We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Jess in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.

Picnic at Hanging Rock, Joan Lindsay (2:02)
The Little Library Cookbook, The Little Library Year and The Little Library Christmas, Kate Young
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark (14:14)
The Naughtiest Girl in the School, Enid Blyton (15:14)
Malory Towers is a series of six novels by Enid Blyton. The first novel is First Term at Malory Towers (15:21)
The Chalet School is a series of 64 novels by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer (15:51)
Frost in May, Antonia White (20:37)
The St Trinian’s books by Ronald Searle are out of print (22:53)
Decline and Fall, Evelyn Waugh (23:44)
Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro (25:17)
The Secret History, Donna Tartt (27:06)
Murder Most Unladylike, Robin Stevens (28:37)
An Experiment in Love, Hilary Mantel (30:17)
Terms & Conditions: Life in Girls’ Boarding-Schools, 1939–1979, Ysenda Maxtone Graham (30:55)
The Worst Witch, Jill Murphy (31:49
Our Lady of the Nile, Scholastique Mukasonga (33:43)
Plain Bad Heroines, Emily M. Danforth (38:53)
The Jennings books by Anthony Buckeridge are out of print (40:11)
Nervous Conditions, Tsitsi Dangarembga (41:53)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles

Hazy Memories of Hanging Rock, Kate Young on Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Issue 64 (2:02)
Chalet Girls, Daisy Hay on Elinor M. Brent-Dyer’s Chalet School books, Issue 56 (16:07)
Once a Catholic . . ., Melissa Harrison on Antonia White, Frost in May, Issue 54 (20.37)
Old Girls and Very Old Girls, Nicola Shulman on Ysenda Maxtone Graham, Terms & Conditions, Issue 52 (30:55)
C. T. Jennings and the Problem of Evil, Robin Blake on Anthony Buckeridge, the Jennings books, Issue 17 (40:11)
Educating Ulyth, Ysenda Maxtone Graham on the girls’ school stories of Angela Brazil, Issue 44

Other Links

The Little Library Cafe: food inspired by literature from Kate Young
Leave No Trace, Madeleine Watts on lost-children narratives in Australia, The Believer (8:36)
Friends of the Chalet School (15:51)
House of Illustration, London (36:24)

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach

The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

31: The Magic of Angela Carter

15 maj 2021 | 43 min

Imagination, influence and the invention of infernal desire machines . . . Edmund Gordon, biographer of Angela Carter, guides the Slightly Foxed team through her colourful works and explores the wider realms of magical realism. Witty and wilfully idiosyncratic, Carter conjured sex and death from fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber, used her Somerset Maugham Award money to leave her husband and go to Japan to write, and absorbed the Latin American influences of Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez. We hear how she enlisted the Marquis de Sade as an ally of feminism, embraced pulp genres and opened doors for David Mitchell, China Miéville, Helen Oyeyemi and more, while always attending to the grammar of the folk story. And, to finish, there are the usual wide-ranging recommendations for reading off the beaten track.

Please find links to books, articles, and further reading listed below. The digits in brackets following each listing refer to the minute and second they are mentioned. (Episode duration: 42 minutes; 50 seconds)

Books Mentioned
We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Jess in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.

The Invention of Angela Carter, Edmund Gordon (2:27)
Shadow Dance, Angela Carter (7:40)
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, Angela Carter (8:46)
Fireworks, Angela Carter (8:51)
The Magic Toyshop, Angela Carter (10:08)
The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter (10:27)
The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim (11:29)
Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado (13:47)
Nights at the Circus, Angela Carter (16:29)
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez (25:50)
Beloved, Toni Morrison (26:21)
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez (27:24)
Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, Barbara Comyns (27:37)
The Sadeian Woman, Angela Carter (29:50)
Shaking A Leg: Collected Journalism and Writings, Angela Carter (31:22)
Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories, Angela Carter (31:24)
A Card from Angela Carter, Susannah Clapp is currently out of print. A reprint is under consideration (36:12)
Extinction, Thomas Bernhard (37:06)
Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel (38:15)
Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca, Ferdinand Mount (40:20)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles

Keeping it Real, Maggie Fergusson interviews the novelist Ali Smith, Issue 54 (9:48)
Sophia Fairclough and Me, Sophie Breese on the novels of Barbara Comyns, Issue 42 (27:35)

Other Links

The Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize (2:30)
Keats House, Hampstead, London (33:50)

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach

The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

30: Jim Ede’s Way of Life

15 april 2021 | 45 min

In this twentieth-century story of a quest for beauty, the writer Laura Freeman introduces us to Jim Ede, a man who, in creating Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, changed the way we look at art. We follow Jim from the trenches of the First World War to Lady Ottoline Morrell’s literary parties in Bloomsbury and a curating job at the Tate. He collected artworks by his friends Ben Nicholson and David Jones, acquired the estate of the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and designed a house in Tangiers that became a sanctuary for soldiers. These were stepping stones towards Jim turning derelict slum cottages into a home and gallery, a space for both tea and tours. And, as ever, we share recommendations for reading off the beaten track.

Please find links to books, articles, and further reading listed below. The digits in brackets following each listing refer to the minute and second they are mentioned. (Episode duration: 45 minutes; 18 seconds)

Books Mentioned
We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Jess in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.

A Way of Life: Kettle’s Yard, Jim Ede is available from the Kettle’s Yard shop
Ottoline Morrell: Life on the Grand Scale, Miranda Seymour is published in a Faber Finds edition. Second-hand copies are available. (12:59)
Savage Messiah: A Biography of the Sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, H. S. (Jim) Ede is available from the Kettle’s Yard shop
David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet, Thomas Dilworth (19:40)
Three Tales, Gustave Flaubert (37:55)
Lady into Fox, David Garnett (38:53)
Indelicacy, Amina Cain (40:26)
Transient Desires, Donna Leon (42:15)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles

Living Art, Mark Haworth-Booth on A Way of Life: Kettle’s Yard, Jim Ede, Issue 42 (28:00)

Other Links

Kettle’s Yard House and Galleries, Cambridge
Tangier Days: the Edes in Morocco, 1936-52 (22.29)
Bookshop.org (2:16)
Heffers Bookshop, Cambridge (33:50)

With thanks to Kettle’s Yard and Paul Allitt for the photo used for this episode’s cover artwork.

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach

The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

29: A Poet’s Haven

15 mars 2021 | 46 min

The artist Barrie Cooke had fishing in common with Ted Hughes, and mud and art in common with Seamus Heaney. Dr Mark Wormald, a scholar on the life and writings of Ted Hughes, has brought to light an extraordinary haul of poems, letters and drawings documenting a decades-long triangular friendship and a shared love of poetry and nature. He describes the spine-tingling discovery of Barrie’s cardboard box stuffed with correspondence and traces its history, starting with the first supper at Barrie’s Kilkenny home, and then at Jerpoint, also on the River Nore, where the trio forged their friendship, Seamus began Station Island and a poet’s haven flourished. From Ted’s dream of a burning fox man, climbing into Carrowkeel passage tombs and visits from Robert Lowell and Tom Paulin to fishing diaries, pike spoons and a stuffed trout, subsurface treasures are dredged up as our literary sifting takes us off the beaten track.

Please find links to books, articles, and further reading listed below. The digits in brackets following each listing refer to the minute and second they are mentioned. (Episode duration: 46 minutes; 20 seconds)

Books Mentioned
We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Jess in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.

River, Ted Hughes (6:46)
Lupercal, Ted Hughes (12:56)
Station Island, Seamus Heaney (14:34)
On Seamus Heaney, R. F. Foster (15:09)
Birthday Letters, Ted Hughes (20:13)
Crow, Ted Hughes (20:42)
Opened Ground, Seamus Heaney (25:15)
The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath And Ted Hughes, Janet Malcolm (39:50)
A Celtic Miscellany, selected and translated by Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson (41:38)
The Mission House, Carys Davies (43:12)
Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, Heather Clark (45:48)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles

Through the Looking Glass, Jane Feaver on life at Faber and Faber, Issue 55

Other Links

For more information about the Barrie Cooke archive, visit the Cambridge University website
Barrie Cooke’s portrait of Ted Hughes, National Portrait Gallery (5:50)
Kilkenney Arts Week (33:47)
Keats-Shelley House, Rome (37:34)
The Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2020 (45:48)

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach

The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

28: An Odyssey through the Classics

15 februari 2021 | 40 min

Daisy Dunn, historian and biographer of Catullus and Pliny, sets our scene in ancient Rome and Greece, entertaining the Slightly Foxed team with literature of love and war, satire and myth, and amplifying echoes of the classics through the ages. We begin with Homer’s monsters and memorials of fallen men, then take a tour of the ancient world, from Catullus’ erotic poetry and Lysistrata’s sex strike to the eruption of Vesuvius and Suetonius’ lives of extraordinary emperors. In a more contemporary turn, F. Scott Fitzgerald borrows Gatsby from the Satyricon, and Mary Renault writes historical novels and lovers’ names in wine. And there’s the usual round-up of recommended reading from off the beaten track.

Please find links to books, articles, and further reading listed below. The digits in brackets following each listing refer to the minute and second they are mentioned. (Episode duration: 39 minutes; 54 seconds)

Books Mentioned
We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Jess in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.

Catullus’ Bedspread: The Life of Rome’s Most Erotic Poet, Daisy Dunn
In the Shadow of Vesuvius: A Life of Pliny, Daisy Dunn
The Odyssey, Homer, translated by Emily Wilson (7:57)
The Iliad, Homer, translated by E. V. Rieu (8:08)
Homer on Life and Death, Jasper Griffin is out of print (9:02)
The Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker (11:01)
Memorial, Alice Oswald (11:42)
The Last of the Wine, Mary Renault (16:37)
The Twelve Caesars, Suetonius, translated by Robert Graves (19:07)
I, Claudius, Robert Graves (21:00)
Pompei, Robert Harris (22:15)
The Satyricon, Petronius, translated by P. G. Walsh (23:48)
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald (24:47)
Rosemary Sutcliff’s Roman and post-Roman novels, Slightly Foxed Cubs (28:19)
Candide, Voltaire (34:26)
When the Lights Go Out, Carys Bray (35:27)
The Diary of a Provincial Lady, E. M. Delafield (37:03)
The Emperor’s Babe, Bernadine Evaristo (37:40)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles

How Homer Taught Me to Read, Adrian Thorpe on Homer, Odyssey and Iliad, Issue 30
Hadrian to the Life, Caroline Chapman on Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, Issue 2 (21:42)
Scaling Gibbon’s Everest, Richard Crockatt on Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Issue 68
Travels with the Father of History, Justin Marozzi on Herodotus, Histories, Issue 20
Brave Old World, Lawrence Sail on Voltaire, Candide, Issue 10 (34:26)

Other Links

Daisy Dunn
The Greek Play, Cambridge (28:27)
Gladstone’s Library (31:37)

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach

The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

27: Dr Wiener’s Library

15 januari 2021 | 37 min

Anthony Wells worked at The Wiener Holocaust Library in London for a decade. In this episode he leads the Slightly Foxed editors into the history of the library, which holds one of the most extensive archives on the Holocaust and the Nazi era. We travel to Germany, Amsterdam, New York and Tel Aviv, but it is people rather than places that the library remembers with its annals of personal stories. Dr Alfred Wiener, a German Jew who fought in the First World War, was one of the first to note the rise of the Nazi Party, and he began to assemble an archive of information in order to undermine their activities. From downfall by documentation in the Nuremberg Trial to a tracing service made up of millions of records, we learn how The Wiener Library ensures that those who disappeared are not forgotten.

With thanks to The Wiener Library for the image used for this episode’s cover artwork: Member of staff, Mrs Walter at The Wiener Library in 1952

Please find links to books, articles, and further reading listed below. The digits in brackets following each listing refer to the minute and second they are mentioned. (Episode duration: 37 minutes; 6 seconds)

Books Mentioned
We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Jess in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.

The Ratline, Philippe Sands (11:39)
An Englishman in Auschwitz, Leon Greenman is out of print (14:25)
Dinner of Herbs: Village Life in 1960s Turkey, Carla Grissmann (28:00)
Hope against Hope, Nadezhda Mandelstam (29:42)
Defying Hitler, Sebastian Haffner (31:04)
An Officer and a Spy, Robert Harris (33:53)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles

Comfortable Words, Anthony Wells on the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, Issue 36
174517, David Spiller on Primo Levi, If This Is a Man and The Truce, Issue 43
Casting Out Fear, Gary Mead on Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, Issue 50
The Hunt for Hitler, Adam Sisman on Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler, Issue 61

Other Links

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach

The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

26: A Winter’s Tale

15 december 2020 | 43 min

In this seasonal episode, the Slightly Foxed team are guided through a snowstorm of winter writing over twelve centuries by the literary critic and author of Weatherland, Alexandra Harris. The tour takes us from Anglo-Saxon mead halls and monsters to Renaissance bodily humours, then on through cool, translucent Enlightenment weather into the dark cloud of the nineteenth century and beyond. We visit frost-fair carnivals on the frozen Thames with Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, brave the Brontës’ wild moorland, stay steamed up indoors with Jane Austen, sink into Dickens’s pea-soupers and see in the ‘year’s midnight’ with John Donne as we listen to a winter’s tale through literature.

Please find links to books, articles, and further reading listed below. The digits in brackets following each listing refer to the minute and second they are mentioned. (Episode duration: 43 minutes; 19 seconds)

Books Mentioned
We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Jess in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.

Weatherland and Romantic Moderns, Alexandra Harris (4:22)
‘A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day’, John Donne (5:02)
Orlando, Virginia Woolf (6:15)
‘The Wanderer’, an Elegy in the Exeter Book (8:50)
Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney (12:07)
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Simon Armitage’s revised edition (13:54)
The Winter’s Tale and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, William Shakespeare (17:08)
The Great Frost: Cold Doings in London, Thomas Dekker is out of print (19:36)
The Diary of John Evelyn (20:41)
The Seasons, James Thomson (22:00)
The Task, William Cowper is out of print. Read an extract from Book I: The Sofa (22:52)
‘Ode to the West Wind’, Percy Bysshe Shelley (26:16)
Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë (27:48)
Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen (29:27)
Bleak House, Charles Dickens (33:14)
‘In Memorium’ in Selected Poems, Alfred, Lord Tennyson (34:31)
Letters from Iceland, W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice (36:53)
Winter, Ali Smith (38:20) 9780241973332
Cider with Rosie, Laurie Lee, Slightly Foxed Edition No. 53 (41:19)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles

Cain’s Clan, John Harrison on Beowulf, Issue 13 (12:07)
Keeping Ahead of the Game, Christopher Rush on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Issue 60 (13:54)
The Abyss Beyond the Orchard, Alexandra Harris on William Cowper, The Centenary Letters, Issue 53 (22:50)
No Coward Soul, Christopher Rush on Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, Issue 56 (27:48)
A Dickens of a Project, Laura Freeman on the works of Charles Dickens, Issue 41 (39:13)

Other Links

The London Library (2:18)

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach

The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

25: A Writer’s Territory

15 november 2020 | 40 min

The Scottish nature writer Jim Crumley takes the Slightly Foxed team on a tour of literary landscapes, from the lochs of the Trossachs and the mountainous Cairngorms to Aldo Leopold’s sand county in Wisconsin and Barry Lopez’s Arctic. Together they trace the chain of writers who have influenced Jim, from Robert Burns and Wordsworth to Thoreau and Walt Whitman, and see nature through the eyes of his hero, the great Scottish naturalist and photographer Seton Gordon. They discuss how folklore has demonized the wolf while Jim believes its reintroduction could hugely benefit the ecology of the Scottish landscape. And finally they venture off the beaten track with this month’s wide-ranging reading recommendations.

Please find links to books, articles, and further reading listed below. The digits in brackets following each listing refer to the minute and second they are mentioned. (Episode duration: 40 minutes; 24 seconds)

Books Mentioned
We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Jess in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.

An Englishman’s Commonplace Book, Roger Hudson (1:14)
A Boy at the Hogarth Press & A Parcel of Time, Richard Kennedy (6:40)
Jim Crumley’s Seasonal Quartet: The Nature of Autumn, The Nature of Winter, The Nature of Spring, The Nature of Summer (11:03)
The Cairngorm Hills of Scotland, The Charm of Skye and Amid Snowy Wastes, Seton Gordon are out print, but some Seton Gordon titles are available from Trieste Publishing (14:11)
A High and Lonely Place, Jim Crumley (15:49)
A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold (18:14)
Arctic Dreams, Barry Lopez (18:43)
The Last Wolf, Jim Crumley (22:54)
Highland River, Neil Gunn is currently out of stock at the publisher (31:07)
Featherhood, Charlie Gilmour (33:28)
The Silver Dark Sea, Susan Fletcher (35:13)
A Month in Siena, Hisham Matar (36:12)
The Hunting Party, Lucy Foley (38:00)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles

Word from the Wood, Galen O’Hanlon on A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold, Issue 54 (18:14)
Northern Lights, Penelope Lively on Arctic Dreams, Barry Lopez, Issue 4 (18:43)

Other Links

An Englishmans’ Commonplace Book ‘launch party’ at John Sandoe Books (1:19)
The Art Workers’ Guild (1:54)
Loch Lomond & The Trossachs National Park (8:37)
Saraband, independent publisher (12:20)
Jim Crumley, The Scots Magazine (31:56)

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach

The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

24: The Lives and Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb

15 oktober 2020 | 44 min

Dr Felicity James, author of Charles Lamb, Coleridge and Wordsworth: Reading Friendship in the 1790s and current custodian of Charles’s writing chair, introduces the Slightly Foxed editors to siblings at the heart of a literary circle. In their Tales from Shakespeare, gentle-hearted drunken-dog Charles wrote the tragedies and Mary, often chided for laughing, the comedies, and together they penned letters using different coloured inks. From a murder in the home and time in private asylums to conversations with Coleridge at the pub, dissertations on roast pig and salons in their London lodgings, we explore the lives of the Lambs and their friendships through books.

Please find links to books, articles, and further reading listed below. The digits in brackets following each listing refer to the minute and second they are mentioned. (Episode duration: 43 minutes; 43 seconds)

Books Mentioned
We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Jess in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.

An Englishman’s Commonplace Book, Roger Hudson (2:03)
Charles Lamb, Coleridge and Wordsworth: Reading Friendship in the 1790s, Felicity James is out of print (2:44)
There have been two editions of the Lambs’ letters: The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, ed. Edwin W. Marrs, Jr., 3 vols. [which go up to 1817], Cornell University Press, 1975, and The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas, 3 vols., Dent, 1935. Sadly neither is still in print.
Tales from Shakespeare, Charles and Mary Lamb (14:33)
Mrs Leicester’s School and Poetry for Children, Charles and Mary Lamb are out of print (14:44)
Essays of Elia, Charles Lamb is out of print (16:46)
A Double Life: A Biography of Charles and Mary Lamb, Sarah Burton is out of print
The Mirror and the Light, Hilary Mantel (39:12)
Ghost Wall, Sarah Moss (41:00)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles

Streets, Streets, Streets, Felicity James on the letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, Issue 65
A Delight in Digression, David Spiller on Essays of Elia, Issue 64 (16:46)

Other Links

The Charles Lamb Society (36:28)

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach

The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

23: A Writer in the Kitchen

15 september 2020 | 43 min

The food writer and chef Olivia Potts joins the Slightly Foxed editors for a literary banquet. Olivia was a barrister for five years before enrolling at Le Cordon Bleu, becoming a cookery columnist on The Spectator and writing A Half Baked Idea, a memoir with recipes. From finding consolation in cooking and precision in pâtisserie to nostalgia-soaked blancmange and family dinners in the Cazalet Chronicles, the conversation flows, welcoming Jane Grigson, Elizabeth David, Charles Dickens and the extraordinary Fanny Cradock to the table along the way. And in this month’s taste from the magazine’s archives, Rachel Khoo’s cookbook conjures up feasts in an attic in Paris.

Please find links to books, articles, and further reading listed below. The digits in brackets following each listing refer to the minute and second they are mentioned. (Episode duration: 43 minutes; 21 seconds)

Books Mentioned
We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. . Please get in touch with Jess in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.
- Frontier Wolf and The Lantern Bearers, Rosemary Sutcliff: Slightly Foxed Cubs (0.50)

- Hons and Rebels, Jessica Mitford: Slightly Foxed Edition No. 52 (0.53)

- An Englishman’s Commonplace Book, Roger Hudson (1.00)

- A Half Baked Idea, Olivia Potts (15:40)

- The Little Library Cookbook, The Little Library Year and The Little Library Christmas, Kate Young (21.08)

- The Cazelet Chronicles, Elizabeth Jane Howard (22.33)

- Cider with Rosie, Laurie Lee: Slightly Foxed Edition No. 53 (23:33)

- Bel-Ami, Guy de Maupassant (24:18)

- Jumping the Queue, Mary Wesley is out of print (25:04)

- The Little Paris Kitchen, Rachel Khoo (28:53)

- The Diary of a Nobody, George & Weedon Grossmith (35:41)

- Good Things to Eat, Lucas Hollweg is out of print (37:53)

- The Pedant in the Kitchen, Julian Barnes (39.17)

- The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt (39:35)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles
- Haikus among the Pears, Olivia Potts on Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book, Issue 62

- Cooking with a Poet, Sue Gee on Paul Roche, Cooking with a Poet, Issue 8 (1:43)

- The Fanny Factor, Laurie Graham on Fanny Cradock, Coping with Christmas, Issue 64 (1:47)

- Attics with Attitude, Elisabeth Russell Taylor on Rachel Khoo, The Little Paris Kitchen, Issue 36 (28:53)

- At Home with the Pewters, Antony Wood on George & Weedon Grossmith, The Diary of a Nobody, Issue 32 (37:17)

Other Links
- Olivia Potts: www.ahalfbakedidea.co.uk

- Olivia Potts’s The Vintage Chef column in Spectator Life (12.50)

- FEAST catering by Olivia Potts and Kate Young (21:01)

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach
Additional music: French Waltz by Sam Bikov from the album Dance the Night Away via www.freemusicarchive.org

The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

22: Independent Spirit

15 augusti 2020 | 38 min

Small but discerning, choosing passion over fashion, Little Toller Books shares an independent spirit with Slightly Foxed. Jon Woolcott joins us from this publishing house based in a converted old dairy in Dorset, and charts the rise from cottage industry origins to a wide, prized backlist. With roots in rural writing, Little Toller has branched out to seek unusual voices, resurrecting the life of the wood engraver Clifford Webb, turning landfill into prose, uncovering Edward Thomas’s hidden photographs and finding a bestseller in the diary of a young naturalist along the way. We turn to the magazine’s archives for John Seymour’s advice on cheddaring, sparging and gaffing, and there’s the usual round-up of recommended reading from off the beaten track.

Please find links to books, articles, and further reading listed below. The digits in brackets following each listing refer to the minute and second they are mentioned. (Episode duration: 37 minutes; 45 seconds)

Books Mentioned
- Four Hedges, Claire Leighton. Available from the end of August 2020 (2:44)

- Men and the Fields, Adrian Bell (2:48)

- The Unofficial Countryside, Richard Mabey (4:30)

- In Pursuit of Spring, Edward Thomas (4:56)

- Diary of a Young Naturalist, Dara McAnulty (7:27)

- The Life and Art of Clifford Webb, Simon Brett (12:52)

- The Fat of the Land and The New Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency, John Seymour (15:23)

- Landfill, Tim Dee (17:51)

- Mr Tibbits’s Catholic School, Ysenda Maxtone Graham (19:35)

- Stand by Me, Wendell Berry (30:35)

- Here We Are, Graham Swift (33:13)

- Anton Chekhov’s short stories (35:00)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles
- These Fragments, Jon Woolcott on John Harris, No Voice from the Hall in Issue 66 (6:34)

- Cheddaring, Sparging and Gaffing, Rowena Macdonald on John Seymour, The Fat of the Land and Self-Sufficiency in Issue 26 (22:50)

Other Links
- Little Toller Books

- Blue Moose Books (10:05)

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach
The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

21: A Bookshelf in Tripoli

15 juli 2020 | 40 min

Justin Marozzi, a travel writer, historian and journalist who’s lived in Somalia, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and Darfur, joins the Slightly Foxed editors on a journey through North Africa and the Middle East. His discovery of a nineteenth-century account of an expedition to Libya in a bookshop in Tripoli led to his crossing of the Sahara by camel, against the advice of Wilfred Thesiger. From dual chronicles of the desert penned by Rosita Forbes and Ahmed Hassanein Bey and tales of books hurled into the Tigris to the picaresque life of Ibn Battutah and travels with a Tangerine, the conversation ranges far and wide, and there are the usual recommendations for reading off the beaten track too.

Please find links to books, articles, and further reading listed below. The digits in brackets following each listing refer to the minute and second they are mentioned. (Episode duration: 40 minutes; 22 seconds)

Books Mentioned
We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Anna in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.
- South from Barbary, Justin Marozzi (3:09)
- The Secret of the Sahara, Rosita Forbes is out of print (7:08)
- The Lost Oases, Ahmed Hassanein Bey is out of print (7:46)
- The Travels of Ibn Battutah, ed. Tim Mackintosh-Smith (11:57)
- Travels with a Tangerine, The Hall of a Thousand Columns and Landfalls, Tim Mackintosh-Smith (12:03)
- Arabs, Tim Mackintosh-Smith (12:26)
- Tamerlane, Justin Marozzi (14:20)
- Warriors, Gerald Hanley (15:43)
- Islamic Empires, Justin Marozzi (20:11)
- Kim, Rudyard Kipling (25:40)
- The Great Game, Peter Hopkirk (33:37)
- Consolations of the Forest, Sylvain Tessant (36:09)
- The Invention of Nature, Andrea Wulf (37:15)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles
- Not Your Average Englishwoman, Justin Marozzi on Rosita Forbes, The Secret of the Sahara in Issue 62 (7:08)
- An Irishman in Somalia, Justin Marozzi on Gerald Hanley, Warriors (15:43)
- Small Player in the Great Game, Amanda Theunissen on Rudyard Kipling, Kim in Issue 57 (25:40)
- Confessions of a TV Tie-in, Tim Mackintosh Smith on Ibn Battutah, The Travels of Ibn Battutah in Issue 18 (11:57)

Other Links
- Justin Marozzi: www.justinmarozzi.com

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach
The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

20: An Issue of Enthusiasms

15 juni 2020 | 37 min

Slightly Foxed Editors Gail and Hazel take us between the pages of the magazine, bookmarking articles along the way. Crack the spine of the quarterly to discover T. H. White taking flying lessons, smutty book titles, a passion for romantic ruins, John Berger shadowing a remarkable GP, a rebellious Mitford ‘rescued’ by a destroyer, a night to remember on the Titanic and much more besides. From correcting proofs to welcoming writers with a host of experiences, the story of putting together an issue of enthusiasms unfolds. And in this month’s reading from the archives, a hapless apprentice at the Hogarth Press recounts his disastrous stint with the Woolfs.

Please find links to books, articles, and further reading listed below. The digits in brackets following each listing refer to the minute and second they are mentioned. (Episode duration: 36 minutes; 33 seconds)

Books Mentioned
We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Anna in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.
- Slightly Foxed Issue 66
- Basil Street Blues, Michael Holroyd: Slightly Foxed Edition No. 29 (6:00)
- England Have My Bones, T. H. White is out of print (6:47)
- Inside of a Dog, Alexandra Horowitz (11:04)
- The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb is out of print (13:04)
- No Voice from the Hall, John Harris is out of print (14:33)
- The Family from One End Street, Eve Garnett (15:15)
- A Taste of Paris, Theodora FitzGibbon is out of print (15:33)
- A Fortunate Man, John Berger (19:38)
- Rosemary Sutcliff’s Roman novels: Slightly Foxed Cubs (21:15)
- Hons and Rebels, Jessica Mitford: Slightly Foxed Edition No. 52, published 1 September 2020 (21:53)
- A Night to Remember, Walter Lord (23:50)
- A Boy at the Hogarth Press, Richard Kennedy: Plain Foxed Edition (24:55)
- House of Glass, Hadley Freeman (31:47)
- All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr (34:00)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles
- Underwater Heaven, Margaret Drabble on Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies in Issue 66 (5:45)
- Harvey Learns the Ropes, Andrew Joynes on Rudyard Kipling, Captains Courageous in Issue 56 (6:24)
- On the Shoulders of Giants, Andrew Joynes on T. H. White, England Have My Bones in Issue 66 (6:30)
- Sarah Crowden on smut: Something for the Weekend in Issue 32 and All in the Mind? in Issue 44 (7:57)
- Unsung Heroes, Alastair Glegg on learning to read at prep school in Issue 60 (9:59)
- Dog’s-eye View, Rebecca Willis on Alexandra Horowitz, Inside of a Dog in Issue 65 (11:04)
- In Praise of Pratchett, Amanda Theunissen on Terry Pratchett, Small Gods in Issue 33 (11:33)
- Streets, Streets, Streets, Felicity James on the letters of Charles and Mary Lamb in Issue 65 (13:06)
- These Fragments, Jon Woolcott on John Harris, No Voice from the Hall in Issue 66 (14:33)
- Keeping up Appearances, Kate Tyte on Eve Garnett, The Family from One End Street in Issue 66 (15:15)
- Simply Delicious, Clive Unger-Hamilton on Theodora FitzGibbon, A Taste of Paris in Issue 66 (15:33)
- An Early-Flowering Climber, Ursula Buchan on the plant-hunting and garden writings of Reginald Farrer in Issue 66 (16:01)
- A Well-tempered Gardener, Michael Leapman on the garden writings of Christopher Lloyd in Issue 59 (17:00)
- Putting up Useful Shelves, Sue Gee on Richard Kennedy, A Boy at the Hogarth Press in Issue 20 (24:55)

Other Links
- Slightly Foxed Editors’ Diary (0:28)

- Sign up to the free Slightly Foxed email newsletter here

- Slightly Foxed articles by Christopher Rush (12:46)

- Little Toller Books (14:18)

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach
Reading music: Dark Hallway, written and performed by Kevin MacLeod courtesy of incompetech.filmmusic.io
The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

19: Tim Pears’s West Country

15 maj 2020 | 41 min

Tim Pears, a writer rooted in the landscape of Devon, takes Slightly Foxed to the West Country. From working at his local library and reading an author a week instead of taking his A Levels to winning the Hawthornden Prize for his first novel, by way of spells as a farm labourer, nursing assistant and night porter, Tim Pears has written eleven novels, watched blacksmiths at work, walked the routes of his characters, balanced research with imagination and chronicled the past as a realist rather than a romantic. We also travel through the magazine’s archives, along the rivers Taw and Torridge, to uncover the man behind Tarka the Otter, and there are the usual recommendations for reading off the beaten track.

Please find links to books, articles, and further reading listed below. The digits in brackets following each listing refer to the minute and second they are mentioned. (Episode duration: 41 minutes; 20 seconds)

Books Mentioned
Please note that while many of these titles by other publishers are available to buy from the Slightly Foxed shop, there may be delays in obtaining them from our distributor. We may also be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Anna for more information.

Books by Tim Pears
- In the Place of Fallen Leaves (5:18)
- In the Light of Morning is out of print (13:22)

- The West Country Trilogy: The Horseman, The Wanderers and The Redeemed (14:14)

Other Books
- Slightly Foxed Issue 66 (1:23)

- Two Middle-Aged Ladies in Andalusia, Penelope Chetwode (1:29)

- The Past Is Myself, Christabel Bielenberg: Plain Foxed Edition (1:50)

- The Empress of Ireland, Christopher Robbins: Slightly Foxed Edition No. 51 (2:00)

-Tarka the Otter, Henry Williamson (27:15)
- Omer Pasha Latas: Marshal to the Sultan, Ivo Andrić (34:14)
- Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner is out of print (36:14)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles
- Tarka the Rotter, Jonathan Law on Henry Williamson, Tarka the Otter in Issue 35 (27:15)

- Surprised by Joy, Jonathan Law on The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner in Issue 48 (36:14)

Other Links
- Sign up to the free Slightly Foxed email newsletter here to receive articles from the quarterly, extracts from books, latest releases, event invitations, news from behind the scenes at SF and other bookish content several times a month. View past newsletters

- Tim Pears: A writer and his dog (25:21)

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach
The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

18: The Ordeal of Evelyn Waugh

15 april 2020 | 45 min

The great prose stylist of the 20th century, monster, performer? Biographer and literary journalist Selina Hastings and writer and critic Alexander Waugh reveal the many reputations of Evelyn Waugh with the Slightly Foxed editors. From a pathological fear of boredom, hallucinations provoked by doses of bromide and cheques bouncing at the Ritz to his relationships conducted through letters, his genius for sharp satire and love of gossip, the conversation brings to light the darkness and humour of Waugh’s works. And we visit The Loved One’s Whispering Glades in this month’s reading from the magazine’s archives.

Please find links to books, articles, and further reading listed below. The digits in brackets following each listing refer to the minute and second they are mentioned. (Episode duration: 45 minutes; 21 seconds)

Books Mentioned
Please note that while many titles by other publishers are available to buy from the Slightly Foxed shop, we will not be able to order them from our distributor and send them out to readers until the office reopens. We may be able to find second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Anna for more information.

Books by Evelyn Waugh
- The Sword of Honour trilogy: Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender (3:14)
- Put out More Flags is out of print (3:53)
- Decline and Fall (11:48)
- Scoop (18:44)
- A Handful of Dust (21:50)
- Brideshead Revisited (22:58)
- The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold is out of print (27:09)
- The Loved One (32:35)

Other Books
- The Carey Novels by Ronald Welch, Slightly Foxed Cubs editions (1:46)
- Evelyn Waugh: A Biography, Selina Hastings is out of print (2:40)
- Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family, Alexander Waugh is out of print (2:47)
- A Russian Journal, John Steinbeck with photographs by Robert Capa (40:37)
- The Singapore Grip, J. G. Farrell (41:40)
- Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography, Diana Price is out of print (42:27)
- Zoo Station, David Downing is out of print (44:02)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles
- The Tortoise of Total War, Anthony Gardner on the Sword of Honour trilogy in Issue 36 (3:14)
- Race of Ghosts, Patrick Denman Flanery on Put out More Flags in Issue 9 (3:53)
- Portrait of the Artist in Middle Age, William Palmer on The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold in Issue 65 (27:09)
- Waugh on the Warpath, Ranjit Bolt on The Loved One in Issue 46 (32:35)

Other Links & Information
- Sign up to the free Slightly Foxed email newsletter here to receive articles from the quarterly, extracts from books, latest releases, event invitations, news from behind the scenes at Foxed HQ and other bookish content several times a month.
- The winner of the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2019: Jonathan Phillips for The Life and Legend of the Sultan Saladin (1:23)
- Alexander Waugh is the general editor of The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh (43 volumes planned), bringing together all of the extant writings and graphic art: novels, biographies, travel writing, short fiction, essays, articles, reportage, reviews, poems, juvenilia, drawings and designs.

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach
The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

17: Margaret Drabble: A Writer’s Life

15 mars 2020 | 44 min

Dame Margaret Drabble joins us at the Slightly Foxed table as we celebrate her life in writing. From taking up her pen in the 1960s as a young mother alone in her kitchen to feeling part of a movement with Nell Dunn, Margaret Forster and Edna O’Brien, to editing The Oxford Companion to English Literature without the help of a computer and eschewing the Booker Prize, Margaret Drabble sees writing as both an illness and a trade, finding black humour in ageing and joy in jigsaw puzzles along the way. And we uncover whatever happened to the elusive novelist Elizabeth Jenkins in this month’s reading from the magazine’s archives.

Please find links to books, articles, and further reading listed below. The digits in brackets following each listing refer to the minute and second they are mentioned. (Episode duration: 44 minutes; 23 seconds)

Books Mentioned

We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Anna in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.

Margaret Drabble Books Mentioned
Out of print
- A Summer Bird-Cage (5:41)
- Arnold Bennett: A Biography (8:58)
- Angus Wilson: A Biography (9:54)
- The Oxford Companion to English Literature, (ed.) Fifth & Sixth editions (11:13)
- The Radiant Way (15:20)
- A Natural Curiosity (15:20)
In print
- The Millstone (14:10)
- The Needle’s Eye (17:37)
- The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws NB Published 7 May 2020 (21:35)
- The Dark Flood Rises (36:48)

Other Books
- Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, Angus Wilson is out of print (10:28)
- The Tortoise and the Hare and Harriet, Elizabeth Jenkins (28:17)
- The Custom of the Country, Edith Wharton (39:08)
- The Unwomanly Face of War, Svetlana Alexievich (40:26)
- To War with Whitaker, Hermione, Countess of Ranfurly: Slightly Foxed Edition No. 50 (41:55)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles
- Whatever Happened to Elizabeth Jenkins?, Nigel Andrew on the novels of Elizabeth Jenkins in Issue 60 (28:17)
- Joyce to the Life, Margaret Drabble on Richard Ellman, James Joyce in Issue 49
- Trollope’s Ireland, Margaret Drabble on the Irish novels of Anthony Trollope in Issue 59

Other Links
- The winner of The Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2019: Jonathan Phillips for The Life and Legend of the Sultan Saladin (1:00)

- The Full Digital Archive of Slightly Foxed (26:23)

- An Index to Slightly Foxed

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach
The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

16: Moving in Royal Circles

15 februari 2020 | 38 min

Biographer and academic Jane Ridley and screenwriter and novelist Daisy Goodwin join the Slightly Foxed Editors to reveal the wealth to be found in royal biographies, memoirs and historical novels. From the remarkable diaries of Queen Victoria and the extraordinary life of Empress Elisabeth of Austria to Prince Albert’s cashmere breeches, a cottage meal at Sissinghurst with the Queen Mother, and Edward VII’s many mistresses, the parade of tales about the lives and loves of royal people roams far and wide. And we go on a on a quest for Queen Mary with James Pope-Hennessy in this month’s hunt through the magazine’s archives.

Please find links to books, articles, and further reading listed below. The digits in brackets following each listing refer to the minute and second they are mentioned. (Episode duration: 38 minutes; 16 seconds)

Books Mentioned

We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Anna in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.
- Blue Remembered Hills, Rosemary Sutcliff. Plain Foxed Edition published 1 March 2020 (2:15)

- Browse and buy the shortlisted titles for the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2019 (2:50)

- Victoria, Daisy Goodwin (4:10)

- Bertie: A Life of Edward VII, Jane Ridley (4:27)

- The historical novels of Jean Plaidy are out of print (16:39)

- The Fortune Hunter, Daisy Goodwin (17:18)

- Victoria (Penguin Monarchs series), Jane Ridley (22:49)

- Queen Mary, James Pope-Hennessy (22:46)

- The Quest for Queen Mary, James Pope-Hennessy, Ed. Hugo Vickers (31.02)

- The Honjin Murders, Seishi Yokomizo (33:33)

- Lady in Waiting, Anne Glenconner (34:24)

- The Journals of Kenneth Rose: Volume One 1944-1979 & Volume Two 1979-2014, Ed. D. R. Thorpe (36:04)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles
- The Purple Moth, Jane Ridley on James Pope-Hennessy, Queen Mary in Issue 41 (25:13)

Other Links
- The Petersfield Bookshop (1:30)

- The Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize (2:42)

- Queen Victoria’s Journals (5:13)

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach
Reading music: Nimrod from Enigma Variations by Elgar
The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

15: Reading Resolutions

15 januari 2020 | 39 min

As we turn the page to a new decade, we’ve made some New Year resolutions. John Mitchinson and Andy Miller of Backlisted Podcast join the Slightly Foxed Editors to bring new life to old books, leading us off the beaten track with wide-ranging reading recommendations. From Frank O’Connor’s letters, Selina Hastings’s lives and Barbara Tuchman’s histories to the poetry of John Berryman, Gayl Jones’s Corregidora and Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, they journey through genres to revive literary curiosity. And in this month’s reading from the magazine’s archives, Richard Platt makes a convincing case for The Quincunx by Charles Palliser, falling under its curse of sleepless nights.

Please find links to books, articles, and further reading listed below. The digits in brackets following each listing refer to the minute and second they are mentioned. (Episode duration: 38 minutes; 49 seconds)

Books Mentioned

We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Anna in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.
- To War with Whitaker, Hermione, Countess of Ranfurly. Slightly Foxed Edition No. 50, published 1 March 2020 (1:21)

- The Year of Reading Dangerously, Andy Miller (3:32)

- A Distant Mirror, Barbara Tuchman (6:05)

- Who Dares Wins: Britain, 1979-1982 and The Great British Dream Factory, Dominic Sandbrook (8:08)

- Corregidora, Gayl Jones (9:33)

- Independence Day, Richard Ford (12:28)

- The Happiness of Getting it Down Right: Letters of Frank O’Connor and William Maxwell is out of print (14:12)

- A Tale of Love and Darkness, Amos Oz (16:34)

- Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson (18:45)

- Selina Hastings has written biographies of Somerset Maugham, Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh and Rosamond Lehmann (22:43)

- 77 Dream Songs, John Berryman is out of print (25:32)

- Diving into the Wreck, Adrienne Rich (27:45)

- The Quincunx, Charles Palliser (32:08)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles
- A World of Words, Annabel Walker on Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness in Issue 37 (16:34)
- Grave Expectations, Richard Platt on Charles Palliser, The Quincunx in Issue 60 (32:08)

Other Links
- The Slightly Foxed mug (now sold out) displayed the quote: ‘Charles Lamb once told Coleridge he was especially fond of books containing traces of buttered muffins.’ Please do get in touch with suggestions for a quote (up to 20 words) for a forthcoming mug design: [email protected] (2:21)
- Backlisted, the literary podcast giving new life to old books, presented by John Mitchinson and Andy Miller (3:22)

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach
Reading music: Songs Without Words - No.12 in F Sharp Minor, Op.30 by Felix Mendelssohn
The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

14: The Vital Spark

15 december 2019 | 37 min

What sparks a lifelong love of reading? Francis Spufford, author of The Child that Books Built, and Emily Drabble of the children’s reading charity BookTrust, delve into bookshelves past and present with the Slightly Foxed Editors to understand the alchemy that ignites the spark. From books as seductive objects, the haphazardness of alphabetical organization and disappearing libraries to the joys of cover-to-cover reading and books being doorways to new worlds, the conversation reveals what a passion for reading can bring to our lives. In this month’s dip into the magazine’s archives Ysenda Maxtone Graham gives tried and tested tips for reading aloud, grappling with Tolkien pronunciations along the way, and there’s the usual round-up of recommendations for reading off the beaten track.

Please find links to books, articles, and further reading listed below. The digits in brackets following each listing refer to the minute and second they are mentioned. (Episode duration: 36 minutes; 57 seconds)

Books Mentioned

We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Anna in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.
- Golden Hill, Francis Spufford (2:23)

- The Child that Books Built, Francis Spufford (2:50)

- The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien (3:58)

- The Jinny books by Patricia Leitch are out of print (4:46)

- Swallows and Amazons, Arthur Ransome (5:36)

- High Rise Mystery, Sharna Jackson (16:35)

- Burglar Bill, Janet & Allan Ahlberg (19:50)

- So Much, Trish Cooke, illus. Helen Oxenbury (20:04)

- The Boy in the Black Suit, Jason Reynolds (32:45)

- The Cazalet Chronicles, Elizabeth Jane Howard (33:27)

- The Gate of Air, James Buchan is out of print (34:16)

- Wave Me Goodbye: Stories of the Second World War, ed. Anne Boston (35:21)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles
- Laura, Louisa and Me, Daisy Hay on her childhood reading and The Child that Books Built in Issue 31 (2:50)

- Three in a Bed, Ysenda Maxtone Graham on reading aloud in Issue 40 (25.18)

Other Links
- BookTrust is the UK’s largest children’s reading charity. They are dedicated to getting children reading, and each year they reach 3.9 million children across the UK with books, resources and support to help develop a love of reading (3:00)

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach

Reading music: The Bluff Trail by Chad Crouch, from Album Field Report Vol 1, made available as Creative Commons thanks to www.freemusicarchive.org

The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

13: Nature & Story

15 november 2019 | 39 min

In the parochial lies the universal, or does it? Join us on a trip to the British countryside as we plough into the matter of nature, landscape and the rural world in literature to find out more. Together with Juliet Blaxland, author of Wainwright Prize shortlisted The Easternmost House, and Jay Armstrong of Elementum Journal, the Slightly Foxed Editors and host Philippa share tales of living on the edge of eroding cliffs, pioneering bird photographers, ancient arboreal giants, guerrilla rewilding and favourite loam and lovechild comfort reads. In this month’s forage through the magazine’s archives, we go down to the Folly Brook to explore a vanishing world with ‘BB’ and his little grey men and, to finish, there are the usual wide-ranging recommendations for books to take your reading off the beaten track.

Please find links to books, articles, and further reading listed below. The digits in brackets following each listing refer to the minute and second they are mentioned. (Episode duration: 38 minutes; 52 seconds)

Books Mentioned

We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Anna in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.

- Slightly Foxed Issue 64 (2:01)

- The Easternmost House, Juliet Blaxland (4:58)

- Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons (11.13)

- Curlew Moon, Mary Colwell (15:45)

- Food for Free, Richard Mabey (16:14)

- Wilding, Isabella Tree (19:18)

- Addlands, Tom Bullough (21:49)

- All Among the Barley, Melissa Harrison (22:29)

- The Little Grey Men, BB (31:44)

- Pollard, Laura Beatty is out of print (33:34)

- When the Tree Falls, Jane Clarke (34:40)

- Plot 29, Allan Jenkins (35:09)

- The Outermost House, Henry Beston (36:06)

- The House of Elrig & Ring of Bright Water, Gavin Maxwell (36:39)

- Reynolds Stone: A Memoir, Humphry Stone (37:25)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles

- Troublesome Ghosts, Paul Evans on Mary Webb, Precious Bane in Issue 10 (10.52)

- Poste-Freudian Therapy, Michele Hanson on Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm in Issue 10 (11.13)

- Beside the Folly Brook, Helena Drysdale on BB, The Little Grey Men & Down the Bright Stream in Issue 55 (25:40)

Other Links

- Elementum Journal: A journal of nature & story (7:16)

- Sotheran’s Rare Books and Prints, London (2:58)

- The Fox’s Prophecy, a poem by D. W. Nash (36:58)
- The Wainwright Book Prize: Celebrating the best in nature writing

The image for this episode features ‘Vasalisa’s Garden’ by Olivia Lomenech Gill. This artwork appeared on the cover of Slightly Foxed Issue 51

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach

The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

12: Slightly Foxed – But Still Desirable

15 oktober 2019 | 41 min

Gail, Hazel and host Philippa enter the world of second-hand bookselling with Chris Saunders of Henry Sotheran’s, the world’s oldest antiquarian bookshop. From folios to quartos, half-binding to cockling, foxing to forgery, they tackle trade terminology and share tales of rarities and curiosities. The conversation ranges far and wide in the typical Slightly Foxed manner – from Parisian romances and the libraries of English country houses to outsized ornithological specimens and books of unusual provenance. In this month’s wander through the magazine’s archives Nigel Anthony recounts the tale of a bookseller’s quest for bibliophilic bliss in a sleepy corner of the Cotswolds, and there’s the usual round-up of recommended reading from off the beaten track.

Please find links to books, articles, and further reading listed below. The digits in brackets following each listing refer to the minute and second they are mentioned. (Episode duration: 40 minutes; 36 seconds)

Books Mentioned
We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Anna in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.

Going Solo, Roald Dahl (2:00)
The Natural History of Selborne, Gilbert White (4:32)
Slightly Foxed – But Still Desirable, Ronald Searle is out of print (7:27)
The Great Game, Peter Hopkirk is out of print (11:13)
Birds of America, John James Audobon (21:00)
Earthworms and Their Allies, Frank E. Beddard is out of print (32:43)
On Chapel Sands, Laura Cumming (34:47)
Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, Amanda Foreman (35:51)
The Berlin Novels: Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin, Christopher Isherwood (36:59)
As It Was and World Without End, Helen Thomas are out of print (38:22)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles

Turning a Page, Glyn Frewer on second-hand bookselling in Issue 42 (26:34)

Other Links

The Slightly Foxed Podcast was selected as one of the Sunday Times Top 100 Podcasts to Love (2:19)
Sotheran’s Rare Books and Prints, London (3:09)
Gilbert White’s House and Gardens, Hampshire (4:28)

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach

Reading music from filmmusic.io
‘Touching Moments Five – Circle’ by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
License: CC BY (creativecommons.org)

The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

11: Orkney’s Prospero

15 september 2019 | 40 min

Gail, Hazel and host Philippa are transported to Orkney as they explore the life and works of the poet and novelist George Mackay Brown OBE. Together with his biographer Maggie Fergusson and Colin Waters of the Scottish Poetry Library, they bring to light a writer who was at once a solitary soul and a raconteur, a lover and a drinker, a member of the Edinburgh literati yet fame-shy. From the oft-recited ‘Hamnavoe’ to the Booker-nominated ‘Beside the Ocean of Time’ Mackay Brown’s work sings of his island roots, interweaving life and social history with myth and legend. In this month’s travels through the magazine’s archives, Christopher Robbins and Rory Murphy tackle the high falutin literary rap of ‘Finnegans Wake’, and there are the usual wide-ranging recommendations for reading off the beaten track too.

Please find links to books, articles, and further reading listed below. The digits in brackets following each listing refer to the minute and second they are mentioned. (Episode duration: 39 minutes; 59 seconds)

Books Mentioned
We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Anna in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.

Rosemary Sutcliff’s Roman novels: The Eagle of the Ninth and The Silver Branch (1:30)
Slightly Foxed Issue 63 (2:17)
The Scots Kitchen, F. M. McNeill (2:39)
The Balkan Trilogy, Olivia Manning (2:56)
Gaudy Night, Dorothy L. Sayers (3:01)
Boy and Going Solo, Roald Dahl (3:13)
Attrib, Eley Williams (5:15)
Cousin Rosamund, the third title in Rebecca West’s Saga of the Century trilogy, is out of print (5:53)
The Outrun, Amy Liptrot (6:04)
George Mackay Brown: The Life, Maggie Fergusson is out of print (7:21)
Greenvoe, George Mackay Brown (19:20)
Following a Lark: Poems, George Mackay Brown is out of print (21:05)
Beside the Ocean of Time, George Mackay Brown (21:15)
Finnegans Wake, James Joyce (24:54)
Jeremy, Hugh Walpole is out of print (33:31)
Slow Horses and Joe Country, Mick Herron (34:57)
Leaving Alexandria, Richard Holloway (36:21)
Noctuary, Niall Campbell (37:28)
Nobody Hates Trump More Than Trump, David Shields (37:51)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles

Porridge and the Shorter Catechism, Morag MacInnes on F. M. McNeill, The Scots Kitchen, Issue 63 (2:36)
Hauntings, Michèle Roberts on Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night, Issue 63 (3:01)
Sound Nonsense, Christopher Robbins on James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, Issue 22 (25:03)

Other Links

The Scottish Poetry Library, Edinburgh (7:23)
‘Hamnavoe’ by George Mackay Brown is available to read in full on The Poetry Archive (12:58)

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach
Farewell to Stromness by Peter Maxwell Davies
The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

10: From Page to Stage

15 augusti 2019 | 39 min

Just who are literary festivals for and why do we love them so much? Gail, Steph and host Philippa go backstage with Anne Oxborough of the well-established Ways With Words and Michael Pugh of recent start-up the Llangwm Literary Festival to find out more. From the delights of surprise-hit speakers, post-show river swims, vodka-fuelled poetry sessions and the rise of fancy food stalls to the horrors of airborne green rooms, bacon-roll bust-ups and rail replacement buses, the conversation ranges far and wide in the usual Slightly Foxed way. In this month’s audio-adventure through the magazine’s archives the writer and performer A. F. Harrold goes speed-dating with Iris Murdoch at Cheltenham Literature Festival and, to finish, there’s the usual round-up of recommended reading from off the beaten track.

Please find links to books, articles, and further reading listed below. The digits in brackets following each listing refer to the minute and second they are mentioned. (Episode duration: 38 minutes; 42 seconds)

Books Mentioned

Slightly Foxed Issue 63 (2:27)
Boy, Roald Dahl (2:32)
The Eagle of the Ninth and The Silver Branch, Rosemary Sutcliff (2:37)
Corduroy, Adrian Bell (2:42)
The Salt Path, Raynor Winn (15:52)
This Is Going to Hurt, Adam Kay (24:05)
Julian of Norwich: A Very Brief History, Janina Ramirez (25:11)
The Sea, The Sea, Iris Murdoch (27:07)
Take Nothing with You, Patrick Gayle (33:23)
The British in India, David Gilmour (34:50)
The Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker (35:44)
Travels in a Dervish Cloak, Isambard Wilkinson (36:40)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles

A Date with Iris, A. F. Harrold on the novels of Iris Murdoch, Issue 25

Other Links

Oxford Literary Festival (1:00)
Sea Fever Literary Festival, Wells-next-the-Sea (1:08)
The Festival of Book Clubs, a one-day annual festival in Hook in the autumn (3:38)
Slightly Foxed Autumn Launch at One Tree Books, Petersfield. Tuesday 10 September, 6.30–8 p.m. (4:15)
Ways With Words: Festivals of Words and Ideas, Dartington, Keswick and Southwold (5:05)
Llangwm Literary Festival, Pembrokeshire (6:18)
Hay Festival, Hay-on-Wye (18:01)
Cheltenham Literature Festival and Edinburgh International Book Festival (18:08)

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach
The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

9: Well-Cultivated Words

15 juli 2019 | 36 min

Gail, Hazel and host Philippa dig into the subject of garden writing with the journalist and social historian Ursula Buchan and Matt Collins, nature writer and Head Gardener at London’s Garden Museum. The conversation meanders convivially in the usual Slightly Foxed manner, via daredevil plant-hunters, early wild gardening advocates such as Gertrude Jekyll, William Robinson and Vita Sackville-West, and the passing passions and fashions of garden design, with a peek over the hedge at Christopher Lloyd’s Great Dixter along the way. And there’s the usual round-up of the latest bookish harvest from the Slightly Foxed office and plenty of recommendations for reading off the beaten track too.

The digits in brackets following each listing refer to the minute and second they are mentioned. (Episode duration: 35 minutes; 50 seconds)

Books Mentioned

We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Anna in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.

84, Charing Cross Road, Helene Hanff. Plain Foxed Edition published 1 September 2019, available to order now (2:24)
Corduroy, Adrian Bell. Plain Foxed Edition published 1 August 2019, available to order now (2:30)
Wood and Garden, Gertrude Jekyll is out of print (11:33)
The Wild Garden, William Robinson (11:34)
The English Flower Garden, William Robinson is out of print (11:38)
We Made a Garden, Margery Fish (13:27)
A Green and Pleasant Land, Ursula Buchan (15:23)
Graham Stuart Thomas titles are out of print (17:04)
Dear Friend and Gardener: Letters on Life and Gardening, Beth Chatto & Christopher Lloyd is out of print (18:46)
Forest: Walking among Trees, Matt Collins. With photographs by Roo Lewis (19:20)
Meetings with Remarkable Trees, Thomas Packenham (19:48)
Trees, Hugh Johnson (19:52)
The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben
Oriental Vegetables, Joy Larkcom is out of print but both The Salad Garden and Grow Your Own Vegetables are available (21:37)
The English Gardener, William Cobbett is out of print (22:06)
The Well-Tempered Garden and In My Garden, Christopher Lloyd (22:49)
The Diary of a Bookseller, Shaun Bythell (31:25)
Where the Hornbeam Grows, Beth Lynch (32:05)
Old Glory, Jonathan Raban (32:33)
So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald, Ed. Terence Dooley is out of print (32:54)
Wilding, Isabella Tree (33:44)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles & Illustrations

An article on Beth Chatto, The Dry Garden will be published in a forthcoming issue of Slightly Foxed (18:11)
A Well-tempered Gardener, Michael Leapman on the garden writings of Christopher Lloyd, Issue 59 (22:49)

Other Links

Ursula Buchan is an award-winning journalist, social historian and garden writer (3:50)
Matt Collins is a nature writer, and Head Gardener at the Garden Museum in Lambeth, London (6:02)
David Douglas (25 June 1799–12 July 1834) was a Scottish botanist, best known as the namesake of the Douglas-fir (10:08)
Hortus, a gardening journal (20:08)
All back issues of Slightly Foxed are available to browse and buy here (30:20)

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach
Sound effects:
An English Country Garden in July by Keith Selmes
Bees and bumblebees foraging by odilonmarcenaro
Thanks to www.freesound.org CC licence, attribution

The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

8: Leaving that Place called Home

15 juni 2019 | 39 min

Hazel, Jennie and host Philippa explore the art of travel writing with the acclaimed author and biographer Sara Wheeler, and Barnaby Rogerson of the well-loved independent publisher Eland Books. Buckle-up and join us on an audio adventure that takes in a coach trip around England, an Antarctic sojourn, a hairy incident involving a Victorian lady and her trusty tweed skirt and a journey across Russia in the footprints of its literary greats, with nods to Bruce Chatwin, Isabella Bird, Norman Lewis, Martha Gellhorn and Patrick Leigh Fermor along the way. And to bring us back down to earth, there’s the usual round-up of news from back home in Hoxton Square and plenty of recommendations for reading off the beaten track.

The digits in brackets following each listing refer to the minute and second they are mentioned. (Episode duration: 39 minutes; 01 seconds)

Books Mentioned

Slightly Foxed Issue 62 (2:05)
The Fountain Overflows, Volume I of Rebecca West’s ‘Saga of the Century’ (2:36)
Something Wholesale, Eric Newby (4:20)
Love and War in the Apennines, Eric Newby (4:24)
Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica, Sara Wheeler (8:00)
A Dragon Apparent, Norman Lewis (11:49)
In Patagonia, Bruce Chatwin. Sara Wheeler abbreviates the opening line, which reads in full: ‘In my grandmother’s dining-room there was a glass-fronted cabinet and in the cabinet was a piece of skin.’ (18:39)
Growing: Seven Years in Ceylon and The Village in the Jungle, Leonard Woolf (19:50)
Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck (20:35)
Semi Invisible Man: The Life of Norman Lewis, Julian Evans (21:09)
Naples ‘44, Norman Lewis (21:31)
Passage to Juneau, Jonathan Raban (22:24)
Mud and Stars, Sara Wheeler, published 4 July 2019 (23:27)
The Saddest Pleasure, Moritz Thomsen (24:29)
A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, Patrick Leigh Fermor (25:16)
Arabs, Tim Mackintosh-Smith (33:32)
Lost in Translation, Eva Hoffman (34:31)
A Woman in the Polar Night, Christiane Ritter is currently out of print. The edition with an introduction by Sara Wheeler will be published by Pushkin Press in November 2019 (35:52)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles & Illustrations

Mood Music, Rebecca Willis on Rebecca West’s ‘Saga of the Century’, Issue 62 (2:22)
Ire and Irritability, Pauline Melville on Sense and Sensibility, Issue 62 (2:56)
Travelling Fearlessly, Maggie Fergusson interviews Colin Thubron in Issue 58 (20:26)
A Great Adventure, Andy Merrills on Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, Issue 38 (25:24)
In Search of Home, Sue Gee on Lost in Translation in Issue 55 (34:31)

Other Links

The Slightly Foxed Podcast website page of episodes and reviews (1:00)
Independent Bookshop Week 2019, 15-22 June. Follow #IndieBookshopWeek and @booksaremybag online (3:38)
Eland Books (11:39)
Katy MacMillan-Scott, Adventures for Harriet: Travelling from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul (31:45)
Lodestars Anthology, selected issues available to buy from Slightly Foxed here (37:41)
Rucksack Magazine (37:58)

Music and sound effects
Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach
Reading music: Lost Memories courtesy of FreeSfx.co.uk

The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

7: A Window on the World

15 maj 2019 | 39 min

Gail, Steph and Anna go behind the scenes with booksellers Brett Wolstencroft of Daunt Books and Kathleen Smith of Topping & Co. Bath to talk about the reality and romance of life running two of the country’s finest bookshops. Andrew Hawkins recounts the tale of a London publisher who tried his hand at repping and ended up in a spot of bother with a drunken poet in Fife, and there’s the usual round-up of recommended reading and news from Hoxton Square.

The digits in brackets following each listing refer to the minute and second they are mentioned. (Episode duration: 38 minutes; 30 seconds)

Books Mentioned

Slightly Foxed Issue 62, will be published on 1 June. Available to order now (5:34)
Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller (30:12)
Jen Campbell, Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops (30:16)
A Plain Foxed Edition of 84, Charing Cross Road will be published in September 2019. Available to order now (30:22)
Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows (30:40)
Patrick O’Brian, Master & Commander and The Far Side of the World (31:46)
Andrew Miller, Now We Shall Be Entirely Free (32:36)
Angela Carter, The Magic Toyshop and The Bloody Chamber (33.02)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles & Illustrations

Mike Petty’s article entitled ‘Up There on a Visit’ was published in Slightly Foxed Issue 8 (23:14)
Maggie Fergusson’s article on Helene Hanff, 84, Charing Cross Road was originally published in Slightly Foxed Issue 24, then republished in Issue 48. It appears as the preface to the Plain Foxed Edition of 84, Charing Cross Road (30:22)
Grant McIntyre’s three articles on Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin novels – ‘Friendship of Opposites’, ‘The House that Jack Built’ and ‘O’Brian’s World’ – were published sequentially in Slightly Foxed Issues 40, 42 and 44 (30:46)

Other Links

A full list of Slightly Foxed stockists can be found on our website: Stockists (1:09)
The Idler Festival, Hampstead, London, 12-14 July 2019 (3:28)
The Llangwm Literary Fesitval, Pembrokeshire, Wales, 9-11 August 2019 (3:34)
Ways with Words Festival, Dartington, Devon, 5-15 July 2019 (3:52)
The Slightly Foxed 2019 Readers’ Day will be held on Saturday 2 November at The Art Workers’ Guild in Bloomsbury, London. Tickets now available to Slightly Foxed magazine subscribers only. From £60 for a day ticket (4:10)
Daunt Books, Marylebone (6:34)
Topping & Company Booksellers of Bath (6:38)
Topping & Company Booksellers are opening a bookshop in Blenheim Place, Edinburgh in the summer of 2019 (16:55)
The image for Episode 7: A Window on the World features a photograph of Topping & Co. Bath courtesy of Miranda’s Notebook

Music & Sound Effects

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach
Reading music: ‘Roads that burned out boots’ by Jahzzar shared under a Creative Commons licence 3.0, via Free Music Archive. No changes were made.
Sound effects: auto engine and crowded bar thanks to FreeSfx.co.uk

The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

6: Well-Written Lives

15 april 2019 | 38 min

Gail, Hazel, Jennie and host Philippa are joined at the table by eminent biographer Adam Sisman to discuss the delicate business of delving into the lives of others – warts and all or, sometimes, all warts no all. The actor Nigel Anthony lends his voice to Edward Lear’s surreal verbal contortions, unearthing the deep sorrow that hid beneath the nonsense.

The digits in brackets following each listing refer to the minute and second they are mentioned. (Episode duration: 38 minutes; 6 seconds)

Books Mentioned

Eric Newby, Love and War in the Apennines will be published as a Slightly Foxed Edition in clothbound hardback on 1 June. Now available to pre-order (1:50)
Adam Sisman, Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Biography, is out of print, but we may be able to get hold of second-hand copies. Please get in touch for details (8:30)
Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler (8:42)
Adam Sisman, John le Carré: The Biography is available from Bloomsbury (9:32)
Adam Sisman, The Professor and the Parson is published on 9 May, and will be available to order in the Summer 2019 Readers’ Catalogue and on the Slightly Foxed website (12:32)
Adam Sisman, Boswell’s Presumptuous Task, is out of print, but we may be able to get hold of second-hand copies. Please get in touch for details (14:16)
Richard Hillary, The Last Enemy. This Slightly Foxed Edition is also available in a bundle with Sebastian Faulks, The Fatal Englishman (17:11)
Vivien Noakes, Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer, is out of print, but we may be able to get hold of second-hand copies. Please get in touch for details (19:24)
Kingsley Amis, The Green Man, on which an article by William Palmer appears in Slightly Foxed Issue 20 (27:58)
My Grandfather & Father, Dear Father, by Denis Constanduros are available in a single edition or in a special Last Call Bundle together with the last copies of our earliest available limited-edition, The Flame Trees of Thika by Elspeth Huxley (28.25)
Bart van Es, The Cut Out Girl (29:30)
Tim Pears, The West Country Trilogy: The Horseman, The Wanderers and The Redeemed (31:00)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles & Illustrations

Adam Sisman’s article on Hugh Trevor-Roper’s The Last Days of Hitler is published in Slightly Foxed Issue 61 (8:44)
William Palmer’s article on Vivien Noakes, Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer was published in Slightly Foxed Issue 56 (19:24)
Read an extract from Chapter VIII of My Grandfather & Father, Dear Father by Denis Constanduros (28:41)

Other Links

Bart van Es won the 2018 Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize for The Cut Out Girl. The award party was held at Maggs Bros. Ltd (2:31)
The Slightly Foxed 2019 Readers’ Day will be held on Saturday 2 November at The Art Workers Guild in Bloomsbury, London. Tickets will go on sale late May/early June, to Slightly Foxed magazine subscribers only. From £60 for a day ticket (3:44)
The Slightly Foxed Spring 2019 Readers’ Catalogue is available to view and download. The Summer Catalogue will be available on 1 June (18:16)
Nigel Anthony stars in a Jarvis & Ayres Production of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal for BBC Radio 3, released soon (25:55)

Music & Sound Effects

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach Archive reading music: Erik Satie, Gymnopedie No 3 played by Kevin MacLeod, thanks to www.freemusicarchive.org

The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

5: Revival

15 mars 2019 | 34 min

Gail, Hazel, Anna and Donna Coonan of Virago Modern Classics gather round the table to talk about giving new life to forgotten voices, and Helen Bourne heads for the Pyramids with a young Priscilla Napier.

The digits in brackets following each listing refer to the minute and second they are mentioned. (Episode duration: 33 minutes; 31 seconds)

Books Mentioned

• Slightly Foxed Issue 61 (2:02)

• Priscilla Napier, A Late Beginner (4:41)

• L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables (12:00)

• Noel Streatfeild’s Christmas Stories (12:47)

• The Slightly Foxed Edition Gail refers to is Sword of Bone, Anthony Rhodes’s memoir of his experiences of WWII and being evacuated from Dunkirk (15:28)

• Marjorie Hillis, Live Alone and Like It, is available through Little, Brown Book Group (16:00)(16:00)

• Winifred Watson, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, is available from Persephone Books (18:40)

• Eric Newby, Love and War in the Apennines (23:26)

• Mary Hocking’s trilogy of titles, Good Daughters, Indifferent Heroes and Welcome Strangers, are out of print, but we may be able to get hold of second-hand copies. Please get in touch for details (29:03)

• Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday (29:37)

• Sigrid Nunez, The Friend (30:06)

• Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow (30:48)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles & Illustrations

• Rowena Macdonald’s article on Philip Hensher’s Kitchen Venom was published in Slightly Foxed Issue 61 (2:18)

• Extract from Priscilla Napier’s memoir, A Late Beginner, read by Helen Bourne (23:54)

• Penelope Lively’s preface to A Late Beginner was also published as an article in Slightly Foxed Issue 21

Other Links

• The second-hand bookshop in Canada is called Reasons to Live Books & Records. A full list of Slightly Foxed stockists can be found on our website: Stockists (0:40)

• The Slightly Foxed Subscribers’ Competition 2019 (3:20)

• The Slightly Foxed Spring 2019 Readers’ Catalogue is available to view and download (3:46)

• The Faber Stories series was launched as part of Faber’s 90th anniversary publishing programme (3:52)

• Virago Modern Classics (6:31)

• Virago Children’s Classics (11:35)

• Persephone Books (18:27)

• For subscriptions to Slightly Foxed magazine, and all our available publications, visit www.foxedquarterly.com (33:05)

Music & Sound Effects

Reading: introductory music Elgar’s Salut D’Amour by James Langevin. Incidental music and sound effects courtesy of www.freesound.org. Thanks to Diegolar for footsteps in the desert, to kyles for desert sounds with crickets and grb1029e for Egyptian Discovery.

The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable.

4: Viewing Is Essential

15 februari 2019 | 32 min

Gail, Hazel and Jennie talk to the artist and illustrator (and master of pastiche) David Eccles about the craft of marrying image and text. The actress Petra Markham takes to the airwaves with Posy Simmonds, and the printmaker Angie Lewin recalls her experience of being commissioned for a Slightly Foxed cover.

Books Mentioned

Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler
Richard Kennedy, A Boy at the Hogarth Press & A Parcel of Time
Gwen Raverat, Period Piece
E. H. Shepard, Drawn from Memory and Drawn from Life
A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh
Christopher Matthew, Now We are Sixty, with decorations by David Eccles
The Slightly Foxed Cubs edition of The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff will be published in September 2019
Posy Simmond’s latest book, Cassandra Darke
Flowers for Mrs Harris by Paul Gallico is also known as Mrs Harris Goes to Paris, and is available in a single volume together with Mrs Harris Goes to New York.
Elizabeth Jenkins, The Tortoise and the Hare
Mathias Enard, Compass
Kathleen Hale’s autobiography, A Slender Reputation, is out of print, but we may be able to get hold of second-hand copies. Please get in touch for details

Related Slightly Foxed Articles & Illustrations

A wood engraving by Hilary Paynter illustrates Adam Sisman’s article on The Last Days of Hitler in Slightly Foxed Issue 61
Slightly Foxed Issue 60 features the illustration ‘Office Life’ by Posy Simmonds
Christopher Robbins’s article on Finnegans Wake was published in Slightly Foxed Issue 22
Angie Lewin is a printmaker and was the cover artist for Slightly Foxed Issue 27
James Nunn provided a pastiche of Eric Ravilious for the cover of Slightly Foxed Issue 17
Maggie Fergusson’s article on Flowers for Mrs Harris was published in Slightly Foxed Issue 20
Nigel Andrew’s article on The Tortoise and the Hare was published in Slightly Foxed Issue 60

Other Links

The shortlist for the 2018 Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize.The award party will be held at Maggs Bros
A full list of Slightly Foxed stockists can be found on our website: Stockists
For subscriptions to Slightly Foxed magazine, visit www.foxedquarterly.com

Thanks to
Angie Lewin, speaking at the Slightly Foxed Readers’ Day 2018 at the Art Workers’ Guild in London.

Music & Sound Effects Blue Jeans courtesy of FreeSfx.co.uk

Production Credits The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

3: Stet

15 januari 2019 | 33 min

In Episode 3: Stet, Gail, Hazel and Anna discuss the art of editing with author and creative writing teacher Sue Gee, and Helen Bourne delves into the dark side of Beatrix Potter.

www.foxedquarterly.com/pod

Books Mentioned

Our series of historical novels by Ronald Welch can be found here
Issue 60 of Slightly Foxed
Our series of Rosemary Sutcliff’s books will be published in September, starting with The Eagle of the Ninth
Sue Gee’s novels include Spring Will Be Ours (1988), Reading in Bed (2007) and Trio (2016). The Mysteries of Glass (2004) was longlisted for the Orange prize (now the Women’s Prize for Fiction)
Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love was edited by Gordon Lish and is available here
Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Mr Tod is available here
Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin
Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Jeremy Fisher
Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Pigling Bland
Beatrix Potter, The Tailor of Gloucester
Kate Atkinson’s novels include Transcription, Human Croquet, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Emotionally Weird
James Hamilton-Paterson, Gerontius
Stet by Diana Athill is out of print, but we may be able to get hold of second hand copies. Please get in touch for details
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
Ronald Blythe’s Word from Wormingford: A Parish Year is out of print, but we may be able to get hold of second hand copies. Please get in touch for details

Related Slightly Foxed Articles & Illustrations

The cover artist for the Summer issue of Slightly Foxed will be Chloe Cheese
Sue Gee’s articles have appeared in Issues 1, 5, 8, 14, 17, 18, 20, 24, 28, 32, 36, 40, 42, 49, 50, 51, 55, 56, 58 and 60 of Slightly Foxed
Sue’s article on The Tale of Mr Tod, Potter’s Dark Materials, was published in Issue 1 of Slightly Foxed

2: The Oldest Paper in the World

15 december 2018 | 33 min

1: Kindred Spirits

15 november 2018 | 31 min

In the first episode of The Slightly Foxed Podcast, SF founders Gail Pirkis, Hazel Wood and Steph Allen meet author Jim Ring round the kitchen table at No. 53 to remember how it all began, and Veronika Hyks gives voice to Liz Robinson’s article on Anne Fadiman’s well-loved Ex Libris.

www.foxedquarterly.com/pod

Books Mentioned

Erskine Childers by Jim Ring is available directly from publishers Faber & Faber
Second-hand copies of Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader are available. Please get in touch for details
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres
James Lees Milne’s memoirs are out of print, but we may be able to get hold of second hand copies. Please get in touch for details

Related Slightly Foxed Articles & Illustrations

Veronika Hyks reads Liz Robinson’s article Kindred Spirits, which can be read in full here
The article on The British Seagull, The Best Outboard Motor for the World was written by Ben Hopkinson and appeared in Issue 26 of Slightly Foxed
The article on Modesty Blaise was written by Amanda Theunissen and appeared in Issue 11 of Slightly Foxed
The article on Georgette Heyer was written by Julia Keay and appeared in Issue 16 of Slightly Foxed
The articles on Proust were written by Anthony Wells and appeared in Issues 56, 57 and 58 of Slightly Foxed
The article on M. R. James was written by Tim Mackintosh-Smith and appeared in Issue 4 of Slightly Foxed
Jim Ring’s articles have appeared in Issues 14, 18, 27 and 43 of Slightly Foxed. His article on Swallows and Amazons can be read here, and on Erskine Childers here

Reading off the Beaten track (Trailer)

7 november 2018 | 2 min

Slightly Foxed

The independent-minded book review magazine that combines good looks, good writing and a personal approach.

Om podden

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52: William Golding: A Literary Colossus

51: John le Carré: Secrets & Lies

50: Barbara Comyns: Stranger than Fiction

My Salinger Year: Joanna Rakoff & Rosie Goldsmith in Conversation

49: Down to Earth: A Farming Revival

48: Dear Dodie

47: Aspects of Orwell

46: Return to Kettle’s Yard

45: Ronald Blythe: A Life Well Written

44: Jean Rhys: Voyages in the Dark

43: Dinner with Joseph Johnson

42: Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure

41: Barbara Pym and Other Excellent Women

40: Adrian Bell: Back to the Land

39: Idle Moments: Literary Loafers through the Ages and Pages

38: Literary Drinking: Alcohol in the Lives and Work of Writers

37: Rewriting the Script: The short life and blazing art of Sylvia Plath with her acclaimed biographer Heather Clark

36: Graphic Novels: A Comic Turn with Posy Simmonds & Paul Gravett

35: Decline and Fall: A Literary Guide

34: Sybille Bedford’s Appetite for Life

33: The Golden Age of Crime Writing

32: Picnic at Hanging Rock & Other Stories

31: The Magic of Angela Carter

30: Jim Ede’s Way of Life

29: A Poet’s Haven

28: An Odyssey through the Classics

27: Dr Wiener’s Library

26: A Winter’s Tale

25: A Writer’s Territory

24: The Lives and Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb

23: A Writer in the Kitchen

22: Independent Spirit

21: A Bookshelf in Tripoli

20: An Issue of Enthusiasms

19: Tim Pears’s West Country

18: The Ordeal of Evelyn Waugh

17: Margaret Drabble: A Writer’s Life

16: Moving in Royal Circles

15: Reading Resolutions

14: The Vital Spark

13: Nature & Story

12: Slightly Foxed – But Still Desirable

11: Orkney’s Prospero

10: From Page to Stage

9: Well-Cultivated Words

8: Leaving that Place called Home

7: A Window on the World

6: Well-Written Lives

5: Revival

4: Viewing Is Essential

3: Stet

2: The Oldest Paper in the World

1: Kindred Spirits

Reading off the Beaten track (Trailer)