Slightly Foxed – Détails, épisodes et analyse

 Any mention of Barbara Comyns usually brings an ‘I know the name but I don’t know anything about her’ kind of response. In this quarter’s literary podcast, presenter Rosie Goldsmith and the Slightly Foxed Editors sit down with Barbara’s biographer Avril Horner and Brett Wolstencroft, Manager of Daunt Books, to discover who this fascinating and forgotten novelist really was. 

Though Barbara enjoyed success in the later part of her life, and a revival with Virago Books in the 1980s, it’s indicative of how thoroughly she disappeared from view that, as Avril tells us, she had difficulty in placing her wonderful biography, Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence, which was finally published this year.

Avril describes how, when working on her biography, she came across a huge cache of letters from the 1930s owned by Barbara’s granddaughter, some of which ‘made her gasp’, and the story of Barbara’s life in London is indeed often shocking. It’s a tale of almost unimaginable poverty, of tangled affairs with unsuitable men, of a grim experience of childbirth, and countless moves from one bleak rented property to another.

Yet after repeatedly hitting rock bottom Barbara always courageously picked herself up and started again. At various times she survived as a commercial artist, artist’s model, dog breeder, antique dealer, renovator of old pianos and dealer in classic cars. At last in 1945 she made a happy marriage to Richard Comyns-Carr, who worked for MI6 where he was a colleague and friend of Kim Philby.
 
The couple moved to Spain, and it was then that Barbara started to write novels drawing on her earlier life such as Sisters by a River and Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. She was admired by Graham Greene who became her publisher, and later came other novels of a more gothic and surrealist kind including A Touch of Mistletoe, Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead and The Vet’s Daughter. No two of her haunting and disturbing novels are alike for she wrote in a variety of genres. She’s an intriguing novelist, totally original, impossible to pigeonhole and ripe for re-rediscovery.

For episode show notes, please see the Slightly Foxed website.
Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No. 3 in E Major by Bach
Hosted by Rosie Goldsmith
Produced by Philippa Goodrich

‘There was no voicemail. I was the voicemail.’ In this out-of-series special episode of the Slightly Foxed podcast Joanna Rakoff, author of the 2008 literary smash hit My Salinger Year (released as a Slightly Foxed limited-edition hardback in March 2024), joins us down the line from her home in Massachusetts for a conversation with our podcast presenter Rosie Goldsmith.

From their respective sides of the Atlantic, Rosie and Joanna take a trip back to New York in the freezing winter of 1996 when Joanna Rakoff, aged 24, landed her first job as assistant at one of the city’s oldest and most distinguished literary agencies. No matter that she didn’t even know what a literary agent was and had lied about her typing speed. She’d also led her parents to believe she was living with a female college friend when she was in fact sharing an unheated Brooklyn apartment with a penniless and unpublished Marxist novelist whose sole and very part-time job was watering the plants at Goldman Sachs. 

Rosie and Joanna take us deep into the strange, time-warped world she’s strayed into at The Agency, with its Selectric typewriters, filing cabinets and carbon paper, and into her unusual relationship with its best-known author J. D. Salinger, to whose mountain of fan mail it was Joanna’s job to reply. Salinger was famously reclusive, wanting nothing to do with his fans and Joanna was supposed to reply with a pro forma letter. But the more heart-wrenching the letters she read, the more she found herself pulled into the senders’ lives and, unbeknownst to her terrifying boss (‘whiskey mink, enormous sunglasses, a long cigarette holder’), she replied to every single one and sometimes, fatally, enclosed a personal note herself.

Joanna describes how My Salinger Year came to be, from a gem of an idea explored in the confessional 2011 BBC Sounds documentary Hey Mr Salinger to a best-selling memoir that inspired a Hollywood film starring Sigourney Weaver and Margaret Qualley, and how, when Salinger died, she turned to her bookshelves for comfort. Now, twenty years after its first publication, My Salinger Year joins the much loved Slightly Foxed Editions list of memoirs by such authors as Hilary Mantel, Jessica Mitford, Roald Dahl, Graham Greene and many others. 

For episode show notes, please see the Slightly Foxed website.

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

Hosted by Rosie Goldsmith

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

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

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

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

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

Related Slightly Foxed Articles

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

Other Links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related Slightly Foxed Articles

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

Other Links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related Slightly Foxed Articles

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

Other Links

• The Idler magazine
• The Oldie magazine

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

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

Booze as muse or a sure road to ruin? In this month’s episode, William Palmer – author of In Love with Hell: Drink in the Lives and Work of Eleven Writers – and Henry Jeffreys – author of Empire of Booze and The Cocktail Dictionary – join the Slightly Foxed team to mull over why alcohol is such an enduring feature in literature. 

From the omnipresence of cocktails in John Cheever’s short stories and ritual aperitifs in Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels to Mr Picksniff falling into Mrs Todger’s fireplace in Martin Chuzzlewit and P. G. Wodehouse’s hangover remedies for booze-soaked Bertie Wooster, drinks are social signifiers in fiction. Charles Dickens was fond of sherry cobblers and Jean Rhys knocked back Pernod in Paris, while Malcolm Lowry was a dipsomaniac and Flann O’Brien dreamed up alcoholic ink for the Irish Times, rendering readers drunk from fumes. We ask why gin denotes despair and port is always jovial, and question whether hitting the bottle helps or hinders the creative process in writers.

Following a convivial sherry, we’re whisked away on a wet-your-whistle-stop tour of drinking dens with our friends at London Literary Tours, barrelling from bars propped up by Oscar Wilde to the follies of Dylan Thomas at Soho’s French House via Ian Fleming’s Vesper cocktail at Dukes. And we finish with a final round of reading recommendations, visiting a whisky distillery in Pakistan in Lawrence Osbourne’s The Wet and the Dry, enjoying Happy Hour with Marlowe Granados and stopping for a nightcap at Kingsley Amis’s ghostly local The Green Man.

(Episode duration: 41 minutes; 16 seconds)

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

• Anne Fadiman, The Wine Lover’s Daughter, Slightly Foxed Edition No. 57 (1:39)
• William Palmer, In Love with Hell: Drink in the Lives and Work of Eleven Writers (2:24)
• Henry Jeffreys, Empire of Booze (2:33)
• Henry Jeffreys, The Cocktail Dictionary
• Dylan Thomas, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (3:41)
• Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking (4:45)
• Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman (6:40)
• Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (11:16)
• Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight (11:49)
• Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr Ripley (12:17)
• Patricia Highsmith, Diaries and Notebooks
• Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (14:54)
• Edward St Aubyn, The Patrick Melrose Novels (17:03)
• Douglas Stuart, Shuggie Bain (19:01)
• Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit (20:42)
• John Cheever, Collected Stories (23:26)
• Jeremy Lewis, Kindred Spirits (26:05)
• Ladybird Books: What to Look For in . . . Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter (33:05)
• Kingsley Amis, The Green Man (35:13)
• Lawrence Osbourne, The Wet and the Dry (36:45)
• Marlowe Granados, Happy Hour (38:27)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles

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

Other Links

• London Literary Tours (28.00)

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

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

Heather Clark, Professor of Contemporary Poetry at the University of Huddersfield and author of the award-winning biography Red Comet, joins the Slightly Foxed team from New York to dispel the myths that have come to surround Sylvia Plath’s life and art.

Tired of the cliché of the hysterical female writer, and of the enduring focus on Plath’s death rather than her trailblazing poetry and fiction, Clark used a wealth of new material – including juvenilia, unpublished letters and manuscripts, and psychiatric records – to explore Plath’s literary landscape. She conjures the spirit of the star English student at Smith College who won a Fulbright scholarship to Cambridge University and who brought her enormous appetite for life to her writing and relationships. We follow her life from the ‘mad passionate abandon’ of her thunderclap meeting with Ted Hughes, rebellion against genteel verse and her creation of a dark ‘potboiler’ in The Bell Jar to her belief that a full literary life and a family unit can coexist and the outpouring of first-rate poems fuelled by rage in her final days. She introduced female anger and energy into the poetic lexicon with ‘Lady Lazarus’, ‘Daddy’, ‘Ariel’ and more; poems that were considered shocking at the time, but which are now regarded as masterpieces.

And there are more biographies to be found in our round-up of reading recommendations – of renegade anthropologists and female abstract expressionists – as well as a relationship between a father and his young son told through illustrated letters that leap off the page in Letters to Michael, with wonderful readings by the actor Nigel Anthony. (Episode duration: 48 minutes; 48 seconds)

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

• Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
• The Letters of Sylvia Plath Vol. I: 1940-1956
• The Letters of Sylvia Plath Vol. II: 1956-1963
• Sylvia Plath, Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices, a radio play (23:28)
• Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (30:16)
• Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition (39:23)
• Sylvia Plath, The Colossus
• Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes
• Lucie Elven, The Weak Spot (41:55)
• Charles King, Gods of the Upper Air is not currently available in the UK (43:44)
• Lily King, Euphoria (44:06)
• Mary Gabriel, Ninth Street Women (44:15)
• Charles Phillipson, Letters to Michael: a father writes to his son 1945–1947. With thanks to the actor Nigel Anthony for the readings. (45:19)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles & Podcasts

• Slightly Foxed Podcast Episode 29: A Poet’s Haven. Dr Mark Wormald, a scholar on the life and writings of Ted Hughes, on the Barrie Cooke archive 

Other Links

• Heather Clark’s website
• Heather Clark wins The Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2020 for Red Comet
• Listen to the 1961 BBC Interview with Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (17:07)
• Listen to the BBC Radio 3 Arts & Ideas podcast on Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Seamus Heaney (44:45)
• The artist Heather Phillipson’s Sketches from Space Instagram account, where she first shared Charles Phillipson’s letters to Michael (45:38)
• The National Poetry Library, Southbank Centre, London (47:31)

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

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

The cartoonist, writer and illustrator Posy Simmonds brilliantly captures the ambitions and pretensions of the literary world, and the journalist and curator Paul Gravett has worked in comics publishing for decades. Together they bring graphic novels and comic books to the foreground with the Slightly Foxed team. We draw moral lessons from the Ally Sloper cartoons of the 1870s, glimpse Frans Masereel’s wordless woodcut stories of the 1920s, view the pictorial politics of Citizen 13660 by Miné Okubo in the 1940s and revisit Art Spiegelman’s 1992 Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus before taking a closer look at more contemporary works.

From a tragicomic summer with Joff Winterhart, nuclear explosions with Raymond Briggs, the shadow of James Joyce with Mary and Bryan Talbot and an Iranian childhood with Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, the discussion moves through panels, frames, splashes and spreads to Posy Simmonds’s own methods in bringing literature to life, including crosshatching to Vivaldi. Originally serialized in the Guardian, Posy’s Gemma Bovery builds on the bones of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Tamara Drewe draws from Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, while Cassandra Darke takes inspiration from Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Though rooted in the classics, the devil is in Posy’s detail, be it real French coffee pots, the joy of characters’ names, such as Kevin Penwallet, and fictional places, such as Tresoddit.

We continue our travels off the beaten track with our usual round-up of reading recommendations, and a trip to Gilbert White’s House and Gardens in Hampshire, where we view the landscapes that sparked his evergreen classic The Natural History of Selborne. (Episode duration: 44 minutes; 39 seconds)

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

• Ally Sloper: A Moral Lesson, cartoons by Marie Duval and words by Judy’s office boy is out of print (4:48)
• Miné Okubo, Citizen 13660 (6:29)
• George Takei, They Called Us Enemy (7:25)
• Jules Feiffer, Passionella and Other Stories is out of print (9:05)
• Art Spiegelman, Maus (10:37)
• Mary M. Talbot & Bryan Talbot, Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes (12:52)
• Joff Winterhart, Days of the Bagnold Summer (13:22)
• Raymond Briggs, When the Wind Blows (15:42)
• Raymond Briggs, Ethel & Ernest (17:07)
• Posy Simmonds, Gemma Bovery (17:48)
• Posy Simmonds, Tamara Drewe (17:48)
• Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis (28:31)
• Posy Simmonds, Cassandra Darke (29:04)
• Riad Sattouf, The Arab of the Future (30:24)
• Alison Bechdel, Fun Home (31:20)
• Posy Simmonds, Literary Life Revisited
• Paul Gravett, Posy Simmonds
• Emma Tennant, Burnt Diaries is out of print (34:20)
• Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways (37:28)
• Our Time, an anthology commissioned by The Lakes International Comic Art Festival (38:29)
• Laurie Lee, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. Published in our series of Slightly Foxed Editions, along with Cider with Rosie (39:54)
• Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne (41:24)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles & Illustrations

• Underwear Was Important, Hazel Wood on the cartoons of Posy Simmonds, Issue 15
• Cover illustration by Posy Simmonds, Issue 16
• Inside cover illustration by Posy Simmonds, Issue 60
• Touched with a Secret Delight, Melissa Harrison on Gilbert White, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, Issue 48

Other Links

• Posy Simmonds Close Up, Cartoonmuseum Basel, Switzerland. The exhibition runs until 24 October 2021 (2:39)
• The bd BOUM festival, Blois, France. The festival is chaired by Posy Simmonds and runs from 19-21 November 2021
• Gosh! Comics, London, UK (31:58)
• The Lakes International Comic Art Festival, Kendal, UK (32:08)
• Thought Bubble, The Yorkshire Comic Convention, Harrogate, UK (32:26)
• Gilbert White’s House & Gardens, Selborne, UK (41:13)

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

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

The Dark Ages, Late Antiquity, the late Roman . . . however you define the years spanning the fall of Rome, the period is rich in stories, real or reimagined.

In this episode Dr Andy Merrills, Associate Professor of Ancient History, joins the Slightly Foxed team to cast light on the surviving literature. We begin with Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire before delving into 4th-century accounts by the Latin historian Ammianus Marcellinus, a spiritual autobiography by Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, ecclesiastical chronicles by the Venerable Bede, Gallic tales of Christian miracles and relic-looting with Gregory of Tours and an alternative look at the period with the modern-day master of Late Antiquity, Peter Brown.

From there we venture into fiction with Rosemary Sutcliff’s adventures inspired by archaeological finds and a retelling of the old British folk ballad ‘The Twa Sisters’ in Lucy Holland’s Sistersong, as well as Gore Vidal’s Julian and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant. We swap tales from Icelandic sagas and set sail on a tenth-century Viking long ship with Frans G. Bengtsson before heading beyond Hadrian’s Wall for a glimpse of the Lindisfarne Gospels on Holy Island and a hunt for second-hand gems at Barter Books in a converted Victorian railway station in Northumberland.

And there’s more historical fiction to be found in further reading recommendations too, as we plunge into the seventeenth-century Essex witch trials with poet A. K. Blakemore’s novel The Manningtree Witches and follow the fortunes of a group of friends in wartime Europe in Olivia Manning’s classic Balkan Trilogy. (Episode duration: 42 minutes; 49 seconds )

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

• A Countryman’s Winter Notebook, Adrian Bell (1:02)
• Letters to Michael: a father writes to his son 1945–1947, Charles Phillipson (1:12)
• The Rosemary Sutcliff Novels, Slightly Foxed Cubs. The final two in the series, The Shield Ring and Sword Song, are now available (2:00)
• The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon (4:18)
• The Later Roman Empire, Ammianus Marcellinus (9:30)
• The History of the Franks, Gregory of Tours (10:41)
• Confessions, Saint Augustine (13:54)
• City of God, Saint Augustine (14:46)
• Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Bede (15:34)
• The World of Late Antiquity, Peter Brown (17:34)
• Julian, Gore Vidal (22:14)
• The Dream of Scipio, Iain Pears (22:54)
• The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro (23:38)
• Dawn Wind, Rosemary Sutcliff (25:06)
• The Long Ships, Frans G. Bengtsson (26:08)
• Beowulf: A New Translation, Maria Dahvana Headley (27:13)
• Sistersong, Lucy Holland (27:30)
• Le Morte Darthur, Thomas Malory (30:53)
• The Last Kingdom, Bernard Cornwell (32:11)
• The Manningtree Witches, A. K. Blakemore (38:17)
• The Balkan Trilogy, Olivia Manning (40:47)

Related Slightly Foxed Articles

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

Other Links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other available books by Sybille Bedford

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

Related Slightly Foxed Articles

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

Other Links

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

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

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