The Mitfords continue to fascinate us, thanks to the witty novels, biographies and letters they wrote, their political involvement on both left and right, and their brush with world history. Rarely a year goes by without another Mitford documentary, film or television series, a volume of letters or a biography. In our latest podcast our emphasis moves from the girls to their mother – matriarch of one of the most outrageous, controversial, influential, glamorous and intriguing families of the twentieth century.

Sydney Redesdale (née Bowles), known by her family as ‘Muv’, was never going to have a conventional life. Her mother died when she was 7, and from the age of 14 she ran her father’s house. She fell in love with David Mitford (later Lord Redesdale) as a teenager and they married in 1904. Of their seven children, Nancy, Pamela, Tom, Diana, Jessica, Unity and Debo, two became bestselling authors, one was imprisoned and two lost their lives as a result of the Second World War, and their political views ranged from fascism to communism.

Sydney was the original Mitford girl, from whom much of her daughters’ legendary strong will, self-confidence and extremism was born. Nancy’s satires of aristocratic life between the wars, The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, portray Sydney as Aunt Sadie, vague and rather disconnected, but in fact Sydney was a divisive character and her daughters squabbled about the nature of the ‘real Muv’ for even longer than they argued about their own political differences.

Our guests on this podcast are two modern Mitfordians, Rachel Trethewey, biographer,  historian and author of Muv: The Story of the Mitford Girls’ Mother, and Frances Donnelly, broadcaster, writer and contributor to Slightly Foxed. Alongside discussion of Sydney and the difficulties of writing about someone with whom you disagree and find hard to like at times, the guests and our editors choose their favourite Mitford titles.

Summer reading recommendations include R. C. Sheriff’s The Fortnight in September and Anne Tyler’s Three Days in June.

Norman Lewis, who died in 2003 at the age of 95, was one of the twentieth century’s most adventurous travellers and one of its most brilliant and compelling writers. He was also prolific, producing fifteen novels, twenty highly praised travel books and hundreds of influential newspaper articles.

So why isn’t he better-known today? The Slightly Foxed team put this question to Julian Evans, a distinguished writer and traveller himself, author most recently of Undefeatable: Odessa in Love and War, and of Semi Invisible Man, the definitive biography of Norman Lewis.

Julian took his title directly from his subject, who described himself as a ‘semi-invisible man’, a watcher from the sidelines who hated personal publicity. It was a lesson Norman learned from a hard childhood in which, as a clever boy growing up in the North London suburbs, he was severely bullied at school. His spiritualist parents, shattered by the deaths of his two older brothers, sent him to stay for some time with his Welsh grandfather and three disturbingly eccentric aunts, an interlude he described in his autobiography Jackdaw Cake.

A sharp dresser with a taste for fast cars, motor bikes and guns (though he hated violence) and a man of great charm, Norman survived during the 1930s Depression by running his own successful camera business. But travelling and writing were his passions, and after wartime service as an army Intelligence officer which produced his masterpiece Naples ’44, he wove the experiences of his worldwide travels into many other magical books such as A Dragon Apparent, Golden Earth and Voices of the Old Sea. He had an unerring instinct for a story and took risks to give a voice to overlooked communities. His Sunday Times article on the genocide of indigenous tribes in Brazil prompted the founding of Survival International, and The Honoured Society exposed the inner workings of the Mafia in Sicily.

Courage, humour, humanity, a distinctive voice and a genius for storytelling – Lewis has them all. ‘One goes on reading page after page as if eating cherries,’ wrote one New York Times reviewer. An essential author, we all agreed, for anyone who relishes good writing.

The Slightly Foxed Editors’ book recommendations were two novels by Joseph O’Connor, My Father’s House and The Ghosts of Rome, and Justin Webb’s childhood memoir The Gift of a Radio. And for an introduction to Norman Lewis, A Quiet Evening, a selection of his best articles introduced by John Hatt.

Wartime bomber pilot, champion jockey, racing journalist, bestselling novelist, Dick Francis truly was a legend. The Slightly Foxed team join Dick’s son Felix and renowned racing commentator Derek Thompson (‘Tommo’ to his fans) to talk about the modest man who left school at 15 but went on to write thrillers set in the world of racing that have sold more than 60 million copies in 35 languages.

Dick grew up with horses and riding was in his blood, though he didn’t become a professional jockey until he was 26, an age when many jockeys are retiring. But he quickly became one of the most successful National Hunt jockeys (and Champion Jockey in 1953–4), riding winners for top owners including the Queen and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. And it was the spectacular collapse of the Queen Mother’s horse Devon Loch beneath him on the point of winning the Grand National in 1956 that finally persuaded Dick to retire from racing and begin a new career, first as a journalist and then as a writer of endlessly inventive crime fiction.

So how did he do it? The novels, with their evocative titles – Dead Cert, Decider, Bolt, Hot Money – take you straight into the world of old-fashioned racing with its toffs and touts and inevitable shady characters. According to Felix, the writing of them was always a partnership, with Dick, a born storyteller, producing the plots and the atmosphere and his wife Mary as brilliant researcher and editor. Felix, too, helped with writing and research, and after Dick’s death in 2010 he was persuaded by Dick’s literary agent to keep the Francis ‘brand’ alive. He is now the author of 19 bestselling ‘Dick Francis’ novels, bringing the racing scene up to date with a female jockey as the heroine of his latest, Dark Horse.

Along with Dick Francis’s story of talent, courage and sheer determination – one he told himself in his autobiography The Sport of Queens – the team enjoyed added anecdotes and insights into the world of racing from ‘Tommo’, and an ending that had us on the edge of our seats.