Slightly Foxed

‘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

 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

‘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

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

Dodie Smith was a phenomenally prolific writer who experienced huge success in her lifetime but is now remembered mainly for her much-loved coming of age novel I Capture the Castle, and her bestselling The Hundred and One Dalmatians.  In this quarter’s literary podcast, coinciding with the revival of her play Dear Octopus at the National Theatre, Dodie’s biographer Valerie Grove joins the Slightly Foxed Editors and new presenter Rosie Goldsmith at the kitchen table to talk about the life and work of ‘little Dodie Smith’, who started writing a journal at the age of 8 and continued every day until she was 90.  Dodie grew up among her mother’s family – an experience she brilliantly recalled in Look Back with Love. Dodie’s uncles loved the theatre and encouraged her passion for the stage, leading her to train as an actor, with limited success. After years of struggle she turned her hand to writing and soon sold her first play, Autumn Crocus, which launched her career. Success followed, along with fur coats, glittering friends, a Rolls-Royce and the arrival of Dodie’s first Dalmatian. Then it was off to America where she and her husband spent the Second World War, joining a literary circle that included Christopher Isherwood and Aldous Huxley. Dodie was terribly homesick and longed to return to home, yet it was her exile that produced I Capture the Castle, a novel through which her nostalgia for England permeates. We end with a round-up of New Year reading recommendations, including a recent biography of the poet John Donne, Super-Infinite by Katherine Rundell, and The Last English King by Julian Rathbone, a historical novel set in the years before the Battle of Hastings.  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

D. J. Taylor, literary critic, novelist and Whitbread Prize-winning author of the definitive Orwell: The Life and its highly acclaimed sequel The New Life, and Masha Karp, Orwell scholar, former Russian features editor at the BBC World Service and author of George Orwell and Russia, join the Slightly Foxed team at the kitchen table in Hoxton Square to take a fresh and deeply personal look at the life and work of George Orwell.  The man who wrote Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four defies categorization. In this quarter’s literary podcast David and Masha sift through newly discovered stashes of letters written by Orwell in the 1930s, and share personal recollections from his adopted son Richard and other living members of his inner circle to tease out fact from fiction and explore the legacy of Orwell’s life and work.  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 D. J. Taylor, Orwell: A New Life (0:30) George Orwell, A Homage to Catalonia (7:27) Masha Karp, George Orwell and Russia (15:10) George Orwell, Burmese Days (31:46) George Orwell, Animal Farm (31:47) George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (31:48) George Orwell, A Clergyman’s Daughter (34:04) George Orwell, Why I Write (38:22) George Orwell, ‘Confessions of a Book Reviewer’, Essays (39:56) George Orwell, ‘Dickens’, Essays (43:45) George Orwell, ‘Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool’, Essays (44:28) Nicholas Fisk, Pig Ignorant (45:25) Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year (45:42) James Aldred, Goshawk Summer (49:10) Edward Chisholm, A Waiter in Paris (51:38) George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London (51:50) Emilé Zola, The Drinking Den (53:18) Claire Wilcox, Patch Work (55:11) Related Slightly Foxed articles The Nightmare of Room 101, Christopher Rush on George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Issue 69 Betrayals, Christopher Rush on George Orwell, Animal Farm, Issue 65 An Extraordinary Ordinary Bloke, Brandon Robshaw on George Orwell, Essays, Issue 56 Pox Britanica, Sue Gee on George Orwell, Burmese Days, Issue 40 All Washed Up, Christopher Robbins on George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, Issue 21 The Road to Room 101, Gordon Bowker on George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Issue 11 Other links The Slightly Foxed Calendar 2024 Readers’ Day 2023  The George Orwell Foundation Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No. 3 in E Major by Bach Produced by Podcastable

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 Jess in the Slightly 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

‘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

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

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

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

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

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

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 The Idler magazine The Oldie magazine 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

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

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

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

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

‘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 A Favourite of the Gods A Compass Error Pleasures and Landscapes 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

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