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Horse & Hound | Dick Francis | The Slightly Foxed Podcast

Horse & Hound | Dick Francis | The Slightly Foxed Podcast

‘I’ve watched it 1000 times; I just wish he’d win it once’ – Dick Francis’s son Felix on the collapse of Devon Loch in the 1956 Grand National . . . One can imagine that a huge win would be the defining moment of any sportsperson’s life… it’s an unfortunate athlete for whom a high-profile failure becomes that moment. But, according to his son, so it was for jockey Dick Francis, who was champion jockey in 1953-1954 before becoming the best-selling author of equestrian novels, such as Dead Cert, Whip Hand and Odds Against . . .
A Countryman’s Spring Notebook | Introduction

A Countryman’s Spring Notebook | Introduction

Spring, for many, is a hopeful time of year. As the days lengthen with a warming sun, the natural world stirs with an energy that enlivens us. The immediate pleasure that Wordsworth felt when seeing ‘a host, of golden daffodils’ has been shared by many. For Emily Dickinson, ‘A Light exists in Spring’ that ‘Almost speaks to you’. Shakespeare writes of the arrival of spring as ‘The sweet o’ the year’, while for William Howlitt the season has a ‘freshness that perhaps we have felt only in childhood’. Adrian Bell lived the life of a countryman for sixty years, and his ability to capture and articulate an essence of spring in his work bears comparison with any writer in this tradition.
A Countryman’s Summer Notebook | Introduction

A Countryman’s Summer Notebook | Introduction

‘I wonder what it would be like to live in a world where it was always June,’ exclaims Anne Shirley, L. M. Montgomery’s delightful character from the Anne of Green Gables novels. In these Summer Notebook essays, the third volume of the seasonal quartet published by Slightly Foxed, Adrian Bell gives us an idea of what it might be like. Writing across thirty of his own summers, together with his memories of earlier ones, Bell expresses the natural exuberance of the English landscape during the summer months; in particular, the ones he enjoyed in the eastern county of Suffolk, where he arrived as a young man to start a farming apprenticeship in 1920. His subsequent travels around the fields and villages of East Anglia – physically and in memory – result in a rich tapestry of past and present visions, creating indelible portraits of a countryside in summer.
A Countryman’s Autumn Notebook | Introduction

A Countryman’s Autumn Notebook | Introduction

‘There is a fortnight when England seems to have every- thing – the flowers of a northern June and the fruits of the warm south, and that fortnight is now. You can stand in the windless calm of an autumn evening and hear the heartbeat of the countryside.’ Bell’s autumn essays, from which this observation is drawn, evoke a season of colour and activity before the quiet and reflection of winter, and they complete our journey through the year with him in this, the final volume of the seasonal quartet of his Countryman’s Notebook.

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