Slightly Foxed

Norman Lewis, who died in 2003 at the age of 95, was one of the twentieth century’s most adventurous travellers and one of its most brilliant and compelling writers. He was also prolific, producing fifteen novels, twenty highly praised travel books and hundreds of influential newspaper articles. So why isn’t he better-known today? The Slightly Foxed team put this question to Julian Evans, a distinguished writer and traveller himself, author most recently of Undefeatable: Odessa in Love and War, and of Semi Invisible Man, the definitive biography of Norman Lewis. Julian took his title directly from his subject, who described himself as a ‘semi-invisible man’, a watcher from the sidelines who hated personal publicity. It was a lesson Norman learned from a hard childhood in which, as a clever boy growing up in the North London suburbs, he was severely bullied at school. His spiritualist parents, shattered by the deaths of his two older brothers, sent him to stay for some time with his Welsh grandfather and three disturbingly eccentric aunts, an interlude he described in his autobiography Jackdaw Cake. A sharp dresser with a taste for fast cars, motor bikes and guns (though he hated violence) and a man of great charm, Norman survived during the 1930s Depression by running his own successful camera business. But travelling and writing were his passions, and after wartime service as an army Intelligence officer which produced his masterpiece Naples ’44, he wove the experiences of his worldwide travels into many other magical books such as A Dragon Apparent, Golden Earth and Voices of the Old Sea. He had an unerring instinct for a story and took risks to give a voice to overlooked communities. His Sunday Times article on the genocide of indigenous tribes in Brazil prompted the founding of Survival International, and The Honoured Society exposed the inner workings of the Mafia in Sicily. Courage, humour, humanity, a distinctive voice and a genius for storytelling – Lewis has them all. ‘One goes on reading page after page as if eating cherries,’ wrote one New York Times reviewer. An essential author, we all agreed, for anyone who relishes good writing. The Slightly Foxed Editors’ book recommendations were two novels by Joseph O’Connor, My Father’s House and The Ghosts of Rome, and Justin Webb’s childhood memoir The Gift of a Radio. And for an introduction to Norman Lewis, A Quiet Evening, a selection of his best articles introduced by John Hatt.

Wartime bomber pilot, champion jockey, racing journalist, bestselling novelist, Dick Francis truly was a legend. The Slightly Foxed team join Dick’s son Felix and renowned racing commentator Derek Thompson (‘Tommo’ to his fans) to talk about the modest man who left school at 15 but went on to write thrillers set in the world of racing that have sold more than 60 million copies in 35 languages. Dick grew up with horses and riding was in his blood, though he didn’t become a professional jockey until he was 26, an age when many jockeys are retiring. But he quickly became one of the most successful National Hunt jockeys (and Champion Jockey in 1953–4), riding winners for top owners including the Queen and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. And it was the spectacular collapse of the Queen Mother’s horse Devon Loch beneath him on the point of winning the Grand National in 1956 that finally persuaded Dick to retire from racing and begin a new career, first as a journalist and then as a writer of endlessly inventive crime fiction. So how did he do it? The novels, with their evocative titles – Dead Cert, Decider, Bolt, Hot Money – take you straight into the world of old-fashioned racing with its toffs and touts and inevitable shady characters. According to Felix, the writing of them was always a partnership, with Dick, a born storyteller, producing the plots and the atmosphere and his wife Mary as brilliant researcher and editor. Felix, too, helped with writing and research, and after Dick’s death in 2010 he was persuaded by Dick’s literary agent to keep the Francis ‘brand’ alive. He is now the author of 19 bestselling ‘Dick Francis’ novels, bringing the racing scene up to date with a female jockey as the heroine of his latest, Dark Horse. Along with Dick Francis’s story of talent, courage and sheer determination – one he told himself in his autobiography The Sport of Queens – the team enjoyed added anecdotes and insights into the world of racing from ‘Tommo’, and an ending that had us on the edge of our seats.

There has never been a literary family quite like the Brontës. In our autumn podcast Ann Dinsdale, Principal Curator of the Brontë Parsonage Museum at Haworth in Yorkshire, joined the Slightly Foxed team to discuss the story of the family’s life there. The Brontës moved to Haworth in 1820 when Patrick Brontë became curate, and the parsonage was established as a museum in 1928 when it was acquired by the Brontë Society. Mrs Brontë and the oldest two daughters, Maria and Elizabeth, died there from tuberculosis, leaving Charlotte, Emily, Anne and their brother Branwell to be educated at home by their widowed father. Ann talks about her work at the Parsonage Museum, a treasure trove of Brontë memorabilia, containing 9,000 items including clothes, letters, first editions and the sisters’ own writing boxes. The Brontës were a close-knit family, sharing their games and creating a rich imaginary world which formed the basis of their later writing. Patrick Brontë was a loving and in many ways an unconventional father, who encouraged the girls’ education and allowed them to read freely. He was a lover of the natural world, and on their daily walks in the wild moorland country around Haworth the sisters absorbed the atmosphere that would permeate their novels. Recognition came in 1847 when each published a novel, though initially they hid behind the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. Charlotte’s Jane Eyre was the first, an overnight sensation which was the talk of literary London, causing endless speculation about the identity of its author. Three months later came Emily’s Wuthering Heights, which shocked readers with its story of passion, violence and revenge, and finally Anne’s Agnes Grey. The scene could have been set for brilliant literary careers, but within two years both Emily and Anne were dead from tuberculosis, Emily at 30 and Anne at 29. Charlotte married her father’s curate, lived on to write Shirley and Villette, based on her time as a teacher in a school in Brussels, and died at 38. Branwell, who never fulfilled his family’s high expectations, died addicted to alcohol and opium when he was 31. Even before Charlotte’s death Haworth had become a place of pilgrimage for Brontë fans, and Mrs Gaskell’s 1857 biography of her helped to establish the family’s lasting fame. Today the Parsonage Museum is hugely popular with visitors. It is also a centre for research and runs an annual festival of women’s writing. Ann’s deep knowledge of the Brontës and her experience of running the museum made for a fascinating discussion, leaving us to wonder, had the sisters lived longer, what their eventual literary legacy might have been. Autumn book recommendations were Blythe Spirit, Ian Collins’s biography of Ronald Blythe, The Brothers York by Thomas Penn, Plainsong, an American novel by Kent Haruf, Traitor’s Legacy by S. J. Parris, and The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller. 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

It’s been said that Muriel Spark’s career was not so much a life as a plot, and she did indeed repeatedly reinvent herself, closing one chapter of her life and opening another, regardless of how many friends and business associates she abandoned along the way. This month the Slightly Foxed team were joined by Muriel Spark’s biographer Martin Stannard, and Spark enthusiast Emily Rhodes of Emily’s Walking Book Club, to discuss the work of this highly original and somewhat forgotten writer and learn how Muriel first invited Martin to write her biography and then did her best to prevent it seeing the light of day. Born in 1918, Muriel grew up in a working class family in Edinburgh – the setting for her most famous novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which was based on a charismatic teacher at her own school. At the age of 19 she closed that chapter of her life by marrying an older maths teacher, Sydney Oswald Spark, known (appropriately) thereafter as SOS, and going with him to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) where their son Robin was born. Unfortunately it soon became obvious that Sydney had severe psychiatric problems and in 1943 Muriel left husband and son and returned to London where she began her career as a novelist. Several times shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and much admired by Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, Muriel produced 22 novels, most of them drawing on events in her own life. Everyone at the Slightly Foxed table had their favourites, including The Girls of Slender Means, A Far Cry from Kensington, Loitering with Intent, and Memento Mori, a clear eyed and also very funny look at old age. Everyone agreed on the brilliance of her writing with its dark humour, preoccupation with the supernatural and with the presence of evil in unlikely places. Her life was equally fascinating, moving from poverty to great wealth and success, and from the shabbier parts of London to intellectual life in New York centred on The New Yorker magazine, to which she became a contributor. In 1954 she was received into the Roman Catholic church and for some time she lived in Rome, relishing the glitter of Italian high society, finally settling in Tuscany with her friend Penelope Jardine, where she died in 2005. Summer reading recommendations included Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan, Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson, Homework by Geoff Dyer and Of Thorn and Briar by Paul Lamb. Martin also praised Electric Spark, the new – and very different – biography of Muriel Spark by Frances Wilson. 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

Described as ‘the first lady of Irish cycling’, Dervla Murphy was renowned for her intrepid spirit, and she remained passionate about travel, writing, politics, conservation and bicycling until her death in 2022. In this episode of the Slightly Foxed podcast we have gathered a number of those who knew and worked with Dervla to discuss the life and work of this extraordinary travel writer. Gail Pirkis and Steph Allen, from Slightly Foxed, worked with Dervla during their time at John Murray Publishers. Rose Baring was her editor at Eland Books and Ethel Crowley was a friend and editor of the recent anthology, Life at Full Tilt: The Selected Writings of Dervla Murphy. Together with our host Rosie Goldsmith they discuss Dervla’s early years and inspiration, consider the experience of publishing her work and examine her place in the Ireland of her time. Born in Lismore, Ireland, in 1931, Dervla lived there until the end of her life. She was an only child and her parents, who originated from Dublin, encouraged her independence and love of books. Her father – who later became the much-loved Waterford County Librarian ‒ had been involved in the Irish republican movement and had served time in Wormwood Scrubs prison for his activities. Dervla spent her childhood caring for her mother who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, and then left school at 14 to care for her full-time. When her parents died in 1962 Dervla, at the age of 30, found herself free to travel. She acquired a bicycle and set out on a journey to Istanbul, through Iran and on to India during one of the worst winters in recent memory. This would become the subject of her first, and most famous book, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle, published in 1965. There followed numerous voyages with her trusty steed and 25 more books, including her highly acclaimed autobiography Wheels within Wheels. She won worldwide praise for her writing and many awards, including the Edward Stanford Award for an Outstanding Contribution to Travel Writing and a Royal Geographical Society Award. Dervla took huge risks, mostly travelling alone and in famously austere style, whether in far-flung Limpopo, the Andes, Gaza or closer to home, where she documented the worst of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Battling injury and political circumstance, she immersed herself in the lives of ordinary people caught in the shifting tides of power that dictated the terms on which they lived. To these people, she listened. What resulted was some of the most astute and compelling travel writing of the twentieth century. As the table choose their favourite book of Dervla’s, we also have our usual round-up of current reading, including the latest mystery from Kate Atkinson, Death at the Sign of the Rook, the Booker Prize-nominated The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng, and Jon Dunn’s monograph on the hummingbird, The Glitter in the Green. 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

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

‘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 magazineOrwell: A New LifeA Homage to Catalonia George Orwell and Russia Burmese Days Animal Farm Nineteen Eighty-Four A Clergyman’s Daughter Why I Write Essays EssaysEssays Pig IgnorantMy Salinger YearGoshawk SummerA Waiter in Paris Down and Out in Paris and London The Drinking DenPatch Work Related Slightly Foxed articles The Nightmare of Room 101Nineteen Eighty-FourBetrayalsAnimal FarmAn Extraordinary Ordinary BlokeEssaysPox BritanicaBurmese DaysAll Washed UpDown and Out in Paris and LondonThe Road to Room 101Keep the Aspidistra Flying Other links The Slightly Foxed Calendar 2024Readers’ Day 2023The 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 magazineWays of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard ArtistsOrlandoThe Great Good PlaceA Classical EducationA Countryman’s Summer NotebookThe Night of Wenceslas The Rose of TibetKolymsky HeightsThe Very Hungry CaterpillarThe Dutch House The Go-Between Related Slightly Foxed articles & podcast episodes Jim Ede’s Way of LifeLiving ArtA Way of Life: Kettle’s YardThe Pram in the HallA Pictorial AutobiographyRussian RouletteKolymsky HeightsHigh AdventureThe Rose of Tibet Other links Kettle’s YardA Way of Life: Kettle’s Yardinaugural concertKettle’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 magazineAkenfield Water Marks: Art in East Anglia The Emperor’s Last IslandThe Country Girls TrilogyThe Age of Illusion: England in the Twenties and Thirties, 1919-1940 The View in Winter: Reflections on Old Age A Very Easy Death Corduroy Word from WormingfordNext to NaturePig IgnorantA Countryman’s Spring NotebookBlood Knots Codename Villanelle The Years No Name Confessions 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 FruitfulnessWormingford booksLight ReadingA Private, Circumspect PeopleAkenfieldWhere There’s a WillNo NameAdrian Bell: Back to the LandJean Rhys: Voyages in the Dark Other links John Clare Cottage 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 magazineWide Sargasso SeaI Used to Live Here OnceSmile PleaseJane EyreThe Collected Short StoriesVoyage in the DarkAfter Leaving Mr MackenzieQuartetWhen the Wicked Man Good Morning, MidnightThe Collected Short StoriesThe Death of GrassAlong the Enchanted WayAlison Related Slightly Foxed Articles Voyage in the DarkNot-so-gay PareeQuartetVoyage in the DarkLiterary DrinkingPatrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure Other Links Shakespeare and Company 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. The Prince, the Showgirl and MeThe Young ArdizzoneDinner with Joseph Johnson: Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary AgeWhy Modern Manuscripts MatterThe TaskMemoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of WomanThe Life and Writing of Henry FuseliThe Female Advocate; a poem occasioned by reading Mr. Duncombes FemineadSlightly Foxed CubsThe Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah EquianoMrs Rundell’s Domestic CookeryThe Story of a LifeThe Whalebone TheatreEmmaWomen and a Changing CivilisationVirginia Woolf: A Critical MemoirSouth RidingThe Time by the Sea Related Slightly Foxed Articles Letters from the HeartLetters Written in Sweden, Norway and DenmarkJust Getting on with ItSelected PoemsThe Abyss Beyond the OrchardThe Centenary Letters‘By God, I’m going to spin’ Other Links Henry Fuseli’s The NightmareDr Johnson’s HouseBenjamin Franklin House 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 WarA Sort of LifePatrick Leigh Fermor: An AdventureA Time of GiftsBetween the Woods and the WaterWalking the Woods and the WaterThe Broken RoadThree Letters from the AndesIll Met by MoonlightThe Cretan RunnerThe Traveller’s TreeJoan: Beauty, Rebel, Muse: The Remarkable Life of Joan Leigh Fermor A Time to Keep SilenceThe Violins of Saint-JacquesManiRoumeliThe Gifts of ReadingA Time of GiftsIn a Land Far from Home Shadow CityThe House by the DvinaIslands of AbandonmentFools of FortuneThe Last September Related Slightly Foxed Articles A Great AdventureA Time of GiftsBetween the Woods and the WaterOff All the Standard MapsRoumeli Other Links www.artemiscooper.comwww.nickhuntscrutiny.comSiân Phillips reads from A Time of GiftsA Time of GiftsDropping anchor at the Hook of HollandThe largest Gothic cathedral in Northern EuropeA Time of GiftsRobert Macfarlane reads from The Gifts of ReadingThe Leigh Fermor House in Kardamyli, Greece – Benaki MuseumArtemis 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. Lark RiseOver to Candleford & Candleford GreenThe Adventures of Miss Barbara PymCrome YellowQuartet in AutumnThe Sweet Dove DiedSome Tame GazelleExcellent WomenA Glass of BlessingsA Few Green LeavesThe Other Elizabeth TaylorMrs Palfrey at the ClaremontAngelThe Vet’s DaughterThe House of DollsWho Was Changed and Who Was DeadOur Spoons Came from WoolworthsA Touch of MistletoeVeraTroy ChimneysTwo Serious LadiesWill She Do? Related Slightly Foxed Articles Not So Bad, ReallyHands across the Tea-shop TableA Game of Hide and SeekThe Other Elizabeth TaylorThere for the DurationAt Mrs Lippincote’sSophia Fairclough and Me Other Links McNally EditionsParis Review Re-Covered columnOurShelves podcastThe 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. Lark RiseOver to Candleford & Candleford GreenAt the Field’s Edge: Adrian Bell and the English CountrysideA Countryman’s Winter NotebookMen and the FieldsCorduroySilver LeyThe Cherry TreeUndertones of WarAdrian Bell: Voice of the CountrysideThe Village CarpenterThe Open Air: An Anthology of English Country LifeMy Own MasterSunrise to SunsetThe Flower and the WheelEnglish PastoralActs and Omissions Behold, This Dreamer!Shackleton’s JourneyBandoola: The Great Elephant Rescue Related Slightly Foxed Articles Winter NoonA Countryman’s Winter NotebookAnother CountryCorduroyFrom the Farmhouse WindowSilver LeyPloughing OnThe Cherry TreeHow long had I been standing here under the old cherry tree?The Cherry Tree Other Links The Adrian Bell Societywww.ruralmuseums.org.uk 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. The Compleat AnglerThe Complete EssaysHow to LiveSymposiumJulian of NorwichA Handful of DustThe Importance of Being EarnestThree Men in a BoatIdle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow The Anatomy of MelancholyCold Comfort FarmThe Lost Diaries of Nigel MolesworthDeath’s Other KingdomNightmare AbbeyThe Dawn of EverythingThe Strays of Paris Related Slightly Foxed Articles ‘Study to be quiet’The Compleat AnglerThe Great Self-ExaminerPoste-Freudian TherapyCold Comfort FarmPeacock’s ProgressHeadlong HallCrotchet Castle Other Links The Idler magazineThe 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