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The Slightly Foxed Podcast

The Slightly Foxed Podcast | All Episodes

The Slightly Foxed Podcast | All Episodes

Catch up with all available episodes of the Slightly Foxed Podcast.

Episode 53: Dervla Murphy: A Life at Full Tilt

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.

Episode 52: William Golding: A Literary Colossus

The first title that springs to mind at the mention of William Golding’s name is most often Lord of the Flies. The classic story of a group of schoolboys marooned on a desert island all but made his reputation and has somewhat overshadowed his twelve other novels.

Episode 51: John le Carré: Secrets & Lies

‘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.

Episode 50: Barbara Comyns: Stranger than Fiction

Rosie Goldsmith and the Slightly Foxed Editors sit down with Barbara Comyns’s biographer Avril Horner and Brett Wolstencroft, Manager of Daunt Books, to discover who this fascinating and forgotten novelist really was.

A Slightly Foxed Podcast Special | My Salinger Year: Joanna Rakoff & Rosie Goldsmith in Conversation

A Slightly Foxed Podcast Special | My Salinger Year: Joanna Rakoff & Rosie Goldsmith in Conversation

‘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),…

Episode 49: Down to Earth: A Farming Revival

Episode 49: Down to Earth: A Farming Revival

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…

Episode 48: Dear Dodie

Episode 48: Dear Dodie

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…

Episode 47: Aspects of Orwell

D. J. Taylor, literary critic, novelist and Whitbread Prize-winning author of the definitive Orwell: The Life (2003) and its highly acclaimed sequel The New Life (2023), and Masha Karp, Orwell scholar, former Russian features editor at the BBC World Service…

Episode 46: Return to Kettle’s Yard

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, in which Laura introduced us to literary art lover Jim Ede and talked us through his life and the founding of his gallery.

Julia Blackburn | Eulogy for Ronald Blythe | Bury St Edmunds, 1 March 2023

Julia Blackburn | Eulogy for Ronald Blythe | Bury St Edmunds, 1 March 2023

It’s odd how one gets to know someone better, or at least in more detail, after they have gone. Ronnie was often in my mind ever since I first met him in 1991, but it’s only now that I begin to see him in his entirety, as it were. I watched a film made when he was in his 50s. The slight figure of a man with a shock of hair and very narrow hips, walking through the familiar streets of Aldeburgh and talking as he walks. ‘So many friends have died,’ he says, ‘but I have no sense of elegy. They are living because I am living. That must be it.’ And now he is living because we are living.

Episode 45: Ronald Blythe: A Life Well Written

‘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.

Episode 44: Jean Rhys: Voyages in the Dark

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.

Episode 43: Dinner with Joseph Johnson

Bookseller, publisher, Dissenter and dinner-party host, Joseph Johnson was a great enabler in the late 18th-century literary landscape . . . Daisy Hay and Kathryn Sutherland 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.

14th September 2022

‘As eccentric as any of Lytton Strachey’s Victorians’ | The Best Book Podcasts for Literary Fans

I beg your indulgence for one podcast that is as eccentric as any of Lytton Strachey’s Victorians, a podcast that grew out of a small British literary quarterly . . . The magazine and its podcast focus on the types of British authors and preoccupations that will have you eager to curl up in a club chair with a cuppa and a bikkie, the better to concentrate on narratives about Barbara Pym, Evelyn Waugh, Francis Spufford, unusual bookshops, and more.

- Bethanne Patrick for Pocket Casts

Episode 42: Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure

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. 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.

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