Slightly Foxed

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

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. The Wine Lover’s DaughterIn Love with Hell: Drink in the Lives and Work of Eleven WritersEmpire of BoozeThe Cocktail DictionaryPortrait of the Artist as a Young DogEveryday DrinkingAt Swim-Two-BirdsThe Third PolicemanWide Sargasso SeaGood Morning, MidnightThe Talented Mr RipleyDiaries and NotebooksWhat We Talk About When We Talk About LoveThe Patrick Melrose NovelsShuggie BainMartin ChuzzlewitCollected StoriesKindred SpiritsWhat to Look For in . . . Spring, Summer, AutumnWinterThe Green ManThe Wet and the DryHappy Hour Related Slightly Foxed Articles The Smoking BishopOn the Randy AgainPortrait of the Artist as a Young DogCheers!The HourEveryday DrinkingA Quare OneVoyage in the DarkWith a Notebook and a UkeleleA Visit from GodThe Green Man Other Links London Literary Tours 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. Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia PlathThe Letters of Sylvia Plath Vol. I: 1940-1956The Letters of Sylvia Plath Vol. II: 1956-1963Three Women: A Poem for Three VoicesThe Bell JarAriel: The Restored EditionThe ColossusThe Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted HughesThe Weak SpotGods of the Upper AirEuphoriaNinth Street WomenLetters to Michael: a father writes to his son 1945–1947 Related Slightly Foxed Articles & Podcasts Slightly Foxed Podcast Episode 29: A Poet’s Haven Other Links Heather Clark’s websiteHeather Clark wins The Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2020 for Red Comet1961 BBC Interview with Sylvia Plath and Ted HughesBBC Radio 3 Arts & Ideas podcastSketches from Space Instagram accountThe National Poetry Library 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 LessonJudyCitizen 13660They Called Us EnemyPassionella and Other StoriesMausDotter of Her Father’s EyesDays of the Bagnold SummerWhen the Wind BlowsEthel & ErnestGemma BoveryTamara DrewePersepolisCassandra DarkeThe Arab of the FutureFun Home Literary Life RevisitedPosy SimmondsBurnt DiariesThe Old WaysOur TimeAs I Walked Out One Midsummer MorningCider with RosieThe Natural History of Selborne Related Slightly Foxed Articles & Illustrations Underwear Was ImportantCover illustrationTouched with a Secret DelightThe Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne Other Links Posy Simmonds Close UpThe bd BOUM festivalGosh! ComicsThe Lakes International Comic Art FestivalThought BubbleGilbert White’s House & Gardens 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 NotebookLetters to Michael: a father writes to his son 1945–1947The Rosemary Sutcliff NovelsThe Shield RingSword SongThe History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman EmpireThe Later Roman EmpireThe History of the FranksConfessionsCity of GodEcclesiastical History of the English PeopleThe World of Late AntiquityJulianThe Dream of ScipioThe Buried GiantDawn WindThe Long ShipsBeowulf: A New TranslationSistersongLe Morte DarthurThe Last KingdomThe Manningtree WitchesThe Balkan Trilogy Related Slightly Foxed Articles Scaling Gibbon’s EverestThe History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman EmpireA Frank Look at HistoryThe History of the FranksLast of the PagansJulianThe Sound of ChariotsLight in the Dark AgesMagical TalismanSword SongThe Shield RingAdrift on the Tides of War Other Links An Odyssey Through the ClassicsBarter Books 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 LifeA Visit to Don OtavioA LegacyThe Best We Can DoThe Trial of Lady Chatterley’s LoverJigsawAldous Huxley: A BiographyVery Heath RobinsonMarcovaldoLight Perpetual Other available books by Sybille Bedford A Favourite of the GodsA Compass ErrorPleasures and Landscapes Related Slightly Foxed Articles Bruised, Shocked, but ElatedA Visit to Don OtavioA Bath with a ViewA Legacy Other Links The Ordeal of Evelyn WaughSybille Bedford on Desert Island DiscsHeath Robinson Museum 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 HallThe Crooked ShoreThe Murder at the VicarageThe Nine TailorsThe Red House MysteryThe Old Man in the CornerA Question of ProofThe CaskLord Peter WimseyCards on the Tablepublished by Dean Street PressTragedy at LawThrones, DominationsPortrait of a MurdererBloodshed in BayswaterDeath of a BooksellerA Surprise for Christmas and Other Seasonal MysteriesMurder at the Manor: Country House MysteriesTwo-Way MurderThe Murder of Roger AckroydVerdict of TwelveAnd Then There Were NoneArrest the Bishoppublished by Dean Street PressThe Poisoned Chocolates CaseThe DryAgatha Christie: A Biography Related Slightly Foxed Articles Murder Most CivilizedVane HopesHauntingsGaudy NightA Gentleman on the CaseThe Judge’s ProgressTragedy at LawLost in the Fens Other Links British Library Crime ClassicsDean Street PressDownload Heffers Crime Fiction Top 100Agatha Christie’s holiday home, Greenway, in Devon 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

‘Whether Picnic at Hanging Rock is fact or fiction, my readers must decide for themselves.’ It’s a scorching St Valentine’s Day in 1900 when three boarding-school girls and a teacher disappear during a day-trip to Hanging Rock in the arid Australian outback. Fact or fiction? Misadventure or murder? Accident or assassination? Join us on our latest literary podcast adventure as we delve into the mystery, history and hysteria of Joan Lindsay’s classic Australian Gothic novel with Kate Young, author of The Little Library Cookbook. From the slow-seeping horror of Hanging Rock to coming-of-age tales of tuck boxes and midnight feasts, high jinks and humour, Kate guides the Slightly Foxed magazine team through the school-story tradition and asks why it’s such fertile ground for fiction. On the way we visit the Chalet School, Malory Towers and St Trinian’s, and slip into darker territory with Decline and Fall, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. In this month’s literary expedition, we take a peek inside Quentin Blake’s House of Illustration, and to finish there’s the usual wide-ranging round-up of current reading featuring: Anthony Buckeridge’s classic Jennings series of prep-school stories; Emily Danforth’s romp, Plain Bad Heroines, inspired by Shirley Jackson; and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s tale of a young girl from a rural village in Zimbabwe, Nervous Conditions. Please find links to books, articles, and further reading listed below. The digits in brackets following each listing refer to the minute and second they are mentioned. (Episode duration: 44 minutes; 24 seconds) Books Mentioned We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Jess in the Slightly Foxed office for more information. Picnic at Hanging RockThe Little Library CookbookThe Little Library YearThe Little Library ChristmasThe Prime of Miss Jean BrodieThe Naughtiest Girl in the SchoolFirst Term at Malory TowersFrost in MaySt Trinian’sDecline and FallNever Let Me GoThe Secret HistoryMurder Most UnladylikeAn Experiment in LoveTerms & Conditions: Life in Girls’ Boarding-Schools, 1939–1979The Worst WitchOur Lady of the NilePlain Bad HeroinesNervous Conditions Related Slightly Foxed Articles Hazy Memories of Hanging RockPicnic at Hanging RockChalet GirlsOnce a Catholic . . .Frost in MayOld Girls and Very Old GirlsTerms & ConditionsC. T. Jennings and the Problem of EvilEducating Ulyth Other Links The Little Library CafeLeave No TraceThe BelieverFriends of the Chalet SchoolHouse of Illustration 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

Imagination, influence and the invention of infernal desire machines . . . Edmund Gordon, biographer of Angela Carter, guides the Slightly Foxed team through her colourful works and explores the wider realms of magical realism. Witty and wilfully idiosyncratic, Carter conjured sex and death from fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber, used her Somerset Maugham Award money to leave her husband and go to Japan to write, and absorbed the Latin American influences of Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez. We hear how she enlisted the Marquis de Sade as an ally of feminism, embraced pulp genres and opened doors for David Mitchell, China Miéville, Helen Oyeyemi and more, while always attending to the grammar of the folk story. And, to finish, there are the usual wide-ranging recommendations for reading off the beaten track. Please find links to books, articles, and further reading listed below. The digits in brackets following each listing refer to the minute and second they are mentioned. (Episode duration: 42 minutes; 50 seconds) Books Mentioned We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Jess in the Slightly Foxed office for more information. The Invention of Angela CarterShadow DanceThe Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor HoffmanFireworksThe Magic ToyshopThe Bloody Chamber,The Uses of EnchantmentHer Body and Other PartiesNights at the CircusOne Hundred Years of SolitudeBelovedLove in the Time of CholeraWho Was Changed and Who Was DeadThe Sadeian Woman,Shaking A Leg: Collected Journalism and WritingsBurning Your Boats: Collected Short StoriesA Card from Angela CarterExtinctionStation ElevenKiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca Related Slightly Foxed Articles Keeping it RealSophia Fairclough and Me Other Links The Slightly Foxed Best First Biography PrizeKeats 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

In this twentieth-century story of a quest for beauty, the writer Laura Freeman introduces us to Jim Ede, a man who, in creating Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, changed the way we look at art. We follow Jim from the trenches of the First World War to Lady Ottoline Morrell’s literary parties in Bloomsbury and a curating job at the Tate. He collected artworks by his friends Ben Nicholson and David Jones, acquired the estate of the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and designed a house in Tangiers that became a sanctuary for soldiers. These were stepping stones towards Jim turning derelict slum cottages into a home and gallery, a space for both tea and tours. And, as ever, we share recommendations for reading off the beaten track. Please find links to books, articles, and further reading listed below. The digits in brackets following each listing refer to the minute and second they are mentioned. (Episode duration: 45 minutes; 18 seconds) Books Mentioned We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Jess in the Slightly Foxed office for more information. A Way of Life: Kettle’s YardOttoline Morrell: Life on the Grand ScaleSavage Messiah: A Biography of the Sculptor Henri Gaudier-BrzeskaDavid Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, PoetThree TalesLady into FoxIndelicacyTransient Desires Related Slightly Foxed Articles Living Art Other Links Kettle’s Yard House and GalleriesTangier Days: the Edes in Morocco, 1936-52Bookshop.orgHeffers Bookshop With thanks to Kettle’s Yard and Paul Allitt for the photo used for this episode’s cover artwork. Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable