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‘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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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 Personageson the landing before leafing through the bookshelves to discover hand-bound early editions of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and works by Henry James. We hear how Jim believed that art was for everyone and wasn’t just for looking at but also for touching, hearing and engaging with: a belief so central to his ethos that he would lend pieces to Cambridge University students to place in their own living spaces.

Books mentioned

We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Jess in the Slightly Foxed office for more information. * Subscribe to Slightly Foxed magazine * Laura Freeman, Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists (0:55) * Virginia Woolf, Orlando (18:30) * Henry James, ‘The Great Good Place’ (19:46) * Richard Cobb, A Classical Education (45:34) * Adrian Bell, A Countryman’s Summer Notebook (46:00) * Lionel Davidson, The Night of Wenceslas(46:15) * Lionel Davidson, The Rose of Tibet (46:29) * Lionel Davidson, Kolymsky Heights (46:32) * Eric Carle, The Very Hungry Caterpillar (48:40) * Ann Pratchett, The Dutch House(49:18) * Osman Yousefzada, The Go-Between(50:59)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Books mentioned

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

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

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

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

Other links * John Clare Cottage, Helpston (50:20)

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

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

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

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

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

Other Links * Shakespeare and Company, Paris (48:45)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Books Mentioned

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Books Mentioned

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Books Mentioned

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Books Mentioned

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

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

Related Slightly Foxed Articles

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

Related Slightly Foxed Articles

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

Related Slightly Foxed Articles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Books Mentioned

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

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

Other available books by Sybille Bedford * A Favourite of the Gods * A Compass Error * Pleasures and Landscapes

Related Slightly Foxed Articles

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

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

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

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

View Details

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

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

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

Books Mentioned

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

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

Related Slightly Foxed Articles

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

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