Over the years Slightly Foxed has come to seem more like a club of people who love books than just a magazine. This is always very noticeable at our annual Readers’ Day – our one-day literary festival – a high point in the Slightly Foxed calendar, to which some of you come year after year to meet the staff and listen to some of our contributors and friends speak about a wide range of books, authors and other bookish subjects.
Slightly Foxed Readers’ Day 2023 will be held on Saturday 4 November at our usual London haunt, the Art Workers’ Guild on Queen Square in Bloomsbury, a short walk from Russell Square and Holborn tube stations.
*NB Tickets are non-refundable. If you are no longer able to attend Readers’ Day, please contact the Slightly Foxed office as soon as possible: [email protected] / +44 (0) 202 7033 0258. If we are able to resell your ticket, we will be able to refund you.
Olivia Potts | Buttery Bliss
Olivia Potts gave up her career as a barrister to become a cook and food writer, a transition she described in her best-selling memoir A Half Baked Idea. She talks to us about her latest book, in which she sings the praises of that magic ingredient known for its power to transform and elevate. Butter: A Celebration is filled with entertaining anecdotes, fascinating history and irresistible recipes, from butter- basted rib-eye steak to mouthwatering damson plum crumble.
D. J. Taylor | George Orwell: Man and Myth
George Orwell, who died in 1950, is today seen as one of the most significant figures in Western literature. His two dystopian masterpieces, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, have together sold over 100 million copies. Even now, he continues to exert a decisive influence on our understanding of international politics. D. J. Taylor’s new biography, Orwell: The New Life, the first full-length study for 20 years, draws on a wide range of previously unseen material to produce a definitive portrait of this complex, driven and self-mythologizing man.
Sara Wheeler | Hell on Wheels
Sara Wheeler is Britain’s best known woman travel writer and Glowing Still: A Woman’s Life on the Road is the story of her dramatic escape from a conventional life in her twenties: to the South Pole via Poland; happy days on India’s Puri Express; an Antarctic lavatory from which a seal popped its head; and an interlude as a Parisian shopgirl. But advancing years bring unexpected freedoms, and journey’s end finds her at peace, contemplating the value of travel and paying homage to her heroines, among them the war correspondent Martha Gellhorn who furnishes Wheeler’s epigraph: ‘I do not wish to be good. I wish to be hell on wheels, or dead.’ Hang on to your hats for some fast and funny revelations.
Stig Abell | A Literary Sleuth
Stig Abell, journalist, broadcaster and former TLS editor, will discuss with the literary journalist Suzi Feay the influences behind his first novel Death Under a Little Sky, a whodunnit set in an isolated English village. Its protagonist, former policeman Jake, has inherited a house which provides him with the perfect escape from retirement and the break-up of his marriage. And like his creator, he finds himself turning for inspiration to Agatha Christie, Lee Child and other great crime fiction writers.
Richard Hawking | At the Field’s Edge
When Adrian Bell became a farmer in East Anglia between the wars, farming was undergoing its most significant transformation for centuries. His writing over the next sixty years not only documented this agricultural revolution but also warned of the effects it would have on both the environment and society. Richard Hawking reminds us of the beauty of Bell’s writing, and also of how far in advance of his time Bell’s thinking was.
