Slightly Foxed

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 BachHosted by Rosie GoldsmithProduced 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 BachHosted by Rosie GoldsmithProduced 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 BachHosted by Rosie GoldsmithProduced 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 BachHosted by Rosie Goldsmith

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 BachHosted by Rosie GoldsmithProduced by Philippa Goodrich

Laura Freeman, chief art critic at The Times and author of Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists, and Kettle’s Yard Director Andrew Nairne take us back to Cambridge in this follow-up to Episode 30 of the Foxed pod.Jim Ede was a man for whom art, books, beauty, friendship and creativity were essential facets of a happy and fulfilled life and, in her acclaimed group biography of Jim and his artists, Laura casts new light on the men and women who gently shaped a new way of making, seeing and living with art for the twentieth century. Laura and Andrew join Slightly Foxed Editors Gail and Hazel at the kitchen table to draw us deeper into Jim and his wife Helen’s way of life at Kettle’s Yard: a domestic home-cum-gallery where pausing to sit is encouraged and artworks, furniture, ceramics, books and found objects from the natural world live side by side in delicious harmony. We follow Laura upstairs to Helen’s sitting-room to meet Constanin Brâncuşi’s cement-cast head of the boy Prometheus, we pause in the light-filled Dancer Room to take in Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s bronze ballerina and we pass Barbara Hepworth’s strokable slate sculpture Three Personages on the landing before leafing through the bookshelves to discover hand-bound early editions of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and works by Henry James. We hear how Jim believed that art was for everyone and wasn’t just for looking at but also for touching, hearing and engaging with: a belief so central to his ethos that he would lend pieces to Cambridge University students to place in their own living spaces. Books mentioned We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with theSlightly Foxed office for more information. Subscribe to Slightly Foxed magazine Laura Freeman, Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists (0:55) Virginia Woolf, Orlando (18:30) Henry James, ‘The Great Good Place’ (19:46) Richard Cobb, A Classical Education (45:34) Adrian Bell, A Countryman’s Summer Notebook (46:00) Lionel Davidson, The Night of Wenceslas (46:15) Lionel Davidson, The Rose of Tibet (46:29) Lionel Davidson, Kolymsky Heights (46:32) Eric Carle, The Very Hungry Caterpillar (48:40) Ann Pratchett, The Dutch House (49:18) Osman Yousefzada, The Go-Between (50:59) Related Slightly Foxed articles & podcast episodes Episode 30 of the Slightly Foxed podcast: Jim Ede’s Way of Life Living Art, Mark Haworth-Booth on Jim Ede, A Way of Life: Kettle’s Yard, Issue 42 The Pram in the Hall, Laura Freeman on Barbara Hepworth, A Pictorial Autobiography, Issue 69 Russian Roulette, Anne Boston on Lionel Davidson, Kolymsky Heights, Issue 60 High Adventure, Derek Robinson on Lionel Davidson, The Rose of Tibet, Issue 32 Other links Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge Jim Ede, A Way of Life: Kettle’s Yard is available from the Kettle’s Yard shop King Charles, the then Prince of Wales, on Kettle’s Yard at their inaugural concert Kettle’s Yard House Tour Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

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 BachThe 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 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. 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 BachThe 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 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. 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 BachThe 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 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. Anne Fadiman, The Wine Lover’s Daughter, Slightly Foxed Edition No. 57 (1:39) William Palmer, In Love with Hell: Drink in the Lives and Work of Eleven Writers (2:24) Henry Jeffreys, Empire of Booze (2:33) Henry Jeffreys, The Cocktail Dictionary Dylan Thomas, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (3:41) Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking (4:45) Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman (6:40) Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (11:16) Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight (11:49) Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr Ripley (12:17) Patricia Highsmith, Diaries and Notebooks Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (14:54) Edward St Aubyn, The Patrick Melrose Novels (17:03) Douglas Stuart, Shuggie Bain (19:01) Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit (20:42) John Cheever, Collected Stories (23:26) Jeremy Lewis, Kindred Spirits (26:05) Ladybird Books: What to Look For in . . . Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter (33:05) Kingsley Amis, The Green Man (35:13) Lawrence Osbourne, The Wet and the Dry (36:45) Marlowe Granados, Happy Hour (38:27) Related Slightly Foxed Articles The Smoking Bishop, William Palmer on drinking and drunkenness in Dickens, Issue 16 (8:52) On the Randy Again, William Palmer on Dylan Thomas, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, Issue 30 (3:41) Cheers!, Henry Jeffreys on Bernard DeVoto, The Hour & Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking, Issue 68 (4:45) A Quare One, Patrick Welland on the novels of Flann O’Brien, Issue 41 (6:40) Voyage in the Dark, Patricia Cleveland-Peck on the novels of Jean Rhys, Issue 4 (10:22) With a Notebook and a Ukelele, Gordon Bowker on the stories of Malcolm Lowry, Issue 37 (19:46) A Visit from God, William Palmer on Kingsley Amis, The Green Man, Issue 20 (35:09) Other Links London Literary Tours (28.00)Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by BachThe 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 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. Ally Sloper: A Moral Lesson, cartoons by Marie Duval and words by Judy’s office boy is out of print (4:48) Miné Okubo, Citizen 13660 (6:29) George Takei, They Called Us Enemy (7:25) Jules Feiffer, Passionella and Other Stories is out of print (9:05) Art Spiegelman, Maus (10:37) Mary M. Talbot & Bryan Talbot, Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes (12:52) Joff Winterhart, Days of the Bagnold Summer (13:22) Raymond Briggs, When the Wind Blows (15:42) Raymond Briggs, Ethel & Ernest (17:07) Posy Simmonds, Gemma Bovery (17:48) Posy Simmonds, Tamara Drewe (17:48) Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis (28:31) Posy Simmonds, Cassandra Darke (29:04) Riad Sattouf, The Arab of the Future (30:24) Alison Bechdel, Fun Home (31:20) Posy Simmonds, Literary Life Revisited Paul Gravett, Posy Simmonds Emma Tennant, Burnt Diaries is out of print (34:20) Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways (37:28) Our Time, an anthology commissioned by The Lakes International Comic Art Festival (38:29) Laurie Lee, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. Published in our series of Slightly Foxed Editions, along with Cider with Rosie (39:54) Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne (41:24) Related Slightly Foxed Articles & Illustrations Underwear Was Important, Hazel Wood on the cartoons of Posy Simmonds, Issue 15 Cover illustration by Posy Simmonds, Issue 16 Inside cover illustration by Posy Simmonds, Issue 60 Touched with a Secret Delight, Melissa Harrison on Gilbert White, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, Issue 48 Other Links Posy Simmonds Close Up, Cartoonmuseum Basel, Switzerland. The exhibition runs until 24 October 2021 (2:39) The bd BOUM festival, Blois, France. The festival is chaired by Posy Simmonds and runs from 19-21 November 2021 Gosh! Comics, London, UK (31:58) The Lakes International Comic Art Festival, Kendal, UK (32:08) Thought Bubble, The Yorkshire Comic Convention, Harrogate, UK (32:26) Gilbert White’s House & Gardens, Selborne, UK (41:13) Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by BachThe 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 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. 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 BachThe Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable