Top of my favourites list

‘Dear slightly foxes, I listen to a wide range of bookish podcasts and yours has gone straight to the top of my favourites list. My only mistake was listening to it in the car on my morning commute rather than settling down in a comfy armchair with a cup of tea. It honestly does feel like the equivalent of a bookish chat with a good friend.’
A. Parsons, Warwickshire
  • Episode 39: Idle Moments: Literary Loafers through the Ages and Pages
    15 January 2022

    Episode 39: Idle Moments: Literary Loafers through the Ages and Pages

    In the spirit of Plato’s Symposium, the Slightly Foxed team enter into lively dialogue with 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 . . . 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.
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  • Episode 34: Sybille Bedford’s Appetite for Life
    15 August 2021

    Episode 34: Sybille Bedford’s Appetite for Life

    ‘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.
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‘The equivalent of a bookish chat with a good friend . . . ’

A. Parsons, Warwickshire


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