Slightly Foxed

The farmer-cum-writer Adrian Bell is best-known for his rural trilogy of Suffolk farming life, Corduroy, Silver Ley and The Cherry Tree. To explore Bell’s life and writing the Slightly Foxed editors are joined by Richard Hawking, chairman of the Adrian Bell Society, author of At the Field’s Edge: Adrian Bell and the English Countryside and editor of A Countryman’s Winter Notebook, a selection of Bell’s newspaper columns.

We follow Bell from middle-class London to a farming apprenticeship in Suffolk, where his inability to do the most basic physical tasks taught him a new respect. A farmer, he discovered, held in his head thousands of facts about animals, crops and fodder, while his eye for a pig was ‘as subtle as an artist’s’. As Bell grappled with life on the land, the locals considered him to be a recuperating invalid or an incompetent idiot but in time he grew into a bona fide countryman, one who criticized Thomas Hardy’s portrayal of the ploughman as ‘only a man harrowing clods’ and who managed to set up his own small farm, Silver Ley.

From the pride of the wagon maker, the repeal of the corn act in the 1920s and the heartbreak of farmers going bankrupt to his bohemian mother making butter, his friend John Nash illustrating Men and the Fields and Second World War soldiers packing Corduroy in their kit bags, we learn that Bell is the perfect writer to reconnect people with the land, one whose work still feels relevant today. As his close friend Ronald Blythe noted, Bell was ‘in love with words’, a love that led to his position as the founder of The Times cryptic crossword. 

And in our usual round-up of recommended reading we enter Walter de la Mare’s dreams, explore Shackleton’s Antarctica and visit Catherine Fox’s fictional Lindchester, the setting for her glorious twenty-first-century Trollopian tales. (Episode duration: 42 minutes; 18 seconds) 

Books Mentioned
We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Jess in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.

Winter Noon, extract from Adrian Bell, A Countryman’s Winter Notebook

Another Country, Christian Tyler on Adrian Bell, Corduroy, Issue 22

From the Farmhouse Window, Melissa Harrison on Adrian Bell, Silver Ley, Issue 46

Ploughing On, Hazel Wood on Adrian Bell, The Cherry Tree, Issue 54

How long had I been standing here under the old cherry tree?, extract from Adrian Bell, The Cherry Tree

The Adrian Bell Society (2:25)

www.ruralmuseums.org.uk (30:57)

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach

The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

In the spirit of Plato’s Symposium, the Slightly Foxed team enter into lively dialogue with two distinguished magazine editors, 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 . . .

The wisdom-loving philosophers of Ancient Greece made a case for carving out leisure time, while the anchorite Julian of Norwich favoured a life of seclusion in which ‘all shall be well’. At the age of thirty-eight Michel de Montaigne retired to a grand book-filled chateau to test out ideas in essays, while George Orwell wrote book reviews in hungover misery. Izaak Walton found contemplation in The Compleat Angler and Jerome K. Jerome found humour in Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, while the autodidactic Mitford sisters sought wild freedom.

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. (Episode duration: 46 minutes; 56 seconds)

Books Mentioned
We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Jess in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.

‘Study to be quiet’, Ken Haigh on Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler, Issue 54 (9:49)

The Great Self-Examiner, Anthony Wells on the essays of Michel de Montaigne, Issue 69 (11:48)

Poste-Freudian Therapy, Michele Hanson on Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm, Issue 10 (34:41)

Peacock’s Progress, J. W. M. Thompson on Thomas Love Peacock, Headlong Hall; Crotchet Castle, Issue 5 (42:29)

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach

The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

Booze as muse or a sure road to ruin? In this month’s episode, William Palmer – author of In Love with Hell: Drink in the Lives and Work of Eleven Writers – and Henry Jeffreys – author of Empire of Booze and The Cocktail Dictionary – join the Slightly Foxed team to mull over why alcohol is such an enduring feature in literature. 

From the omnipresence of cocktails in John Cheever’s short stories and ritual aperitifs in Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels to Mr Picksniff falling into Mrs Todger’s fireplace in Martin Chuzzlewit and P. G. Wodehouse’s hangover remedies for booze-soaked Bertie Wooster, drinks are social signifiers in fiction. Charles Dickens was fond of sherry cobblers and Jean Rhys knocked back Pernod in Paris, while Malcolm Lowry was a dipsomaniac and Flann O’Brien dreamed up alcoholic ink for the Irish Times, rendering readers drunk from fumes. We ask why gin denotes despair and port is always jovial, and question whether hitting the bottle helps or hinders the creative process in writers.

Following a convivial sherry, we’re whisked away on a wet-your-whistle-stop tour of drinking dens with our friends at London Literary Tours, barrelling from bars propped up by Oscar Wilde to the follies of Dylan Thomas at Soho’s French House via Ian Fleming’s Vesper cocktail at Dukes. And we finish with a final round of reading recommendations, visiting a whisky distillery in Pakistan in Lawrence Osbourne’s The Wet and the Dry, enjoying Happy Hour with Marlowe Granados and stopping for a nightcap at Kingsley Amis’s ghostly local The Green Man.

(Episode duration: 41 minutes; 16 seconds)

Books Mentioned
We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Jess in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.

The Smoking Bishop, William Palmer on drinking and drunkenness in Dickens, Issue 16 (8:52)

On the Randy Again, William Palmer on Dylan Thomas, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, Issue 30 (3:41)

Cheers!, Henry Jeffreys on Bernard DeVoto, The Hour & Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking, Issue 68 (4:45)

A Quare One, Patrick Welland on the novels of Flann O’Brien, Issue 41 (6:40)

Voyage in the Dark, Patricia Cleveland-Peck on the novels of Jean Rhys, Issue 4 (10:22)

With a Notebook and a Ukelele, Gordon Bowker on the stories of Malcolm Lowry, Issue 37 (19:46)

A Visit from God, William Palmer on Kingsley Amis, The Green Man, Issue 20 (35:09)

London Literary Tours (28.00)
Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach

The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

Heather Clark, Professor of Contemporary Poetry at the University of Huddersfield and author of the award-winning biography Red Comet, joins the Slightly Foxed team from New York to dispel the myths that have come to surround Sylvia Plath’s life and art.

Tired of the cliché of the hysterical female writer, and of the enduring focus on Plath’s death rather than her trailblazing poetry and fiction, Clark used a wealth of new material – including juvenilia, unpublished letters and manuscripts, and psychiatric records – to explore Plath’s literary landscape. She conjures the spirit of the star English student at Smith College who won a Fulbright scholarship to Cambridge University and who brought her enormous appetite for life to her writing and relationships. We follow her life from the ‘mad passionate abandon’ of her thunderclap meeting with Ted Hughes, rebellion against genteel verse and her creation of a dark ‘potboiler’ in The Bell Jar to her belief that a full literary life and a family unit can coexist and the outpouring of first-rate poems fuelled by rage in her final days. She introduced female anger and energy into the poetic lexicon with ‘Lady Lazarus’, ‘Daddy’, ‘Ariel’ and more; poems that were considered shocking at the time, but which are now regarded as masterpieces.

And there are more biographies to be found in our round-up of reading recommendations – of renegade anthropologists and female abstract expressionists – as well as a relationship between a father and his young son told through illustrated letters that leap off the page in Letters to Michael, with wonderful readings by the actor Nigel Anthony. (Episode duration: 48 minutes; 48 seconds)

Books Mentioned
We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Jess in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.

Slightly Foxed Podcast Episode 29: A Poet’s Haven. Dr Mark Wormald, a scholar on the life and writings of Ted Hughes, on the Barrie Cooke archive 
Other Links

The National Poetry Library, Southbank Centre, London (47:31)

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach

The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

The cartoonist, writer and illustrator Posy Simmonds brilliantly captures the ambitions and pretensions of the literary world, and the journalist and curator Paul Gravett has worked in comics publishing for decades. Together they bring graphic novels and comic books to the foreground with the Slightly Foxed team. We draw moral lessons from the Ally Sloper cartoons of the 1870s, glimpse Frans Masereel’s wordless woodcut stories of the 1920s, view the pictorial politics of Citizen 13660 by Miné Okubo in the 1940s and revisit Art Spiegelman’s 1992 Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus before taking a closer look at more contemporary works.

From a tragicomic summer with Joff Winterhart, nuclear explosions with Raymond Briggs, the shadow of James Joyce with Mary and Bryan Talbot and an Iranian childhood with Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, the discussion moves through panels, frames, splashes and spreads to Posy Simmonds’s own methods in bringing literature to life, including crosshatching to Vivaldi. Originally serialized in the Guardian, Posy’s Gemma Bovery builds on the bones of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Tamara Drewe draws from Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, while Cassandra Darke takes inspiration from Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Though rooted in the classics, the devil is in Posy’s detail, be it real French coffee pots, the joy of characters’ names, such as Kevin Penwallet, and fictional places, such as Tresoddit.

We continue our travels off the beaten track with our usual round-up of reading recommendations, and a trip to Gilbert White’s House and Gardens in Hampshire, where we view the landscapes that sparked his evergreen classic The Natural History of Selborne. (Episode duration: 44 minutes; 39 seconds)

Books Mentioned
We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Jess in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.

Ally Sloper: A Moral Lesson, cartoons by Marie Duval and words by Judy’s office boy is out of print (4:48)

Our Time, an anthology commissioned by The Lakes International Comic Art Festival (38:29)

Underwear Was Important, Hazel Wood on the cartoons of Posy Simmonds, Issue 15

Cover illustration by Posy Simmonds, Issue 16

Touched with a Secret Delight, Melissa Harrison on Gilbert White, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, Issue 48

Posy Simmonds Close Up, Cartoonmuseum Basel, Switzerland. The exhibition runs until 24 October 2021 (2:39)

The bd BOUM festival, Blois, France. The festival is chaired by Posy Simmonds and runs from 19-21 November 2021

Gosh! Comics, London, UK (31:58)

The Lakes International Comic Art Festival, Kendal, UK (32:08)

Thought Bubble, The Yorkshire Comic Convention, Harrogate, UK (32:26)

Gilbert White’s House & Gardens, Selborne, UK (41:13)

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach

The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

The Dark Ages, Late Antiquity, the late Roman . . . however you define the years spanning the fall of Rome, the period is rich in stories, real or reimagined.

In this episode Dr Andy Merrills, Associate Professor of Ancient History, joins the Slightly Foxed team to cast light on the surviving literature. We begin with Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire before delving into 4th-century accounts by the Latin historian Ammianus Marcellinus, a spiritual autobiography by Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, ecclesiastical chronicles by the Venerable Bede, Gallic tales of Christian miracles and relic-looting with Gregory of Tours and an alternative look at the period with the modern-day master of Late Antiquity, Peter Brown.

From there we venture into fiction with Rosemary Sutcliff’s adventures inspired by archaeological finds and a retelling of the old British folk ballad ‘The Twa Sisters’ in Lucy Holland’s Sistersong, as well as Gore Vidal’s Julian and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant. We swap tales from Icelandic sagas and set sail on a tenth-century Viking long ship with Frans G. Bengtsson before heading beyond Hadrian’s Wall for a glimpse of the Lindisfarne Gospels on Holy Island and a hunt for second-hand gems at Barter Books in a converted Victorian railway station in Northumberland.

And there’s more historical fiction to be found in further reading recommendations too, as we plunge into the seventeenth-century Essex witch trials with poet A. K. Blakemore’s novel The Manningtree Witches and follow the fortunes of a group of friends in wartime Europe in Olivia Manning’s classic Balkan Trilogy. (Episode duration: 42 minutes; 49 seconds )

Books Mentioned
We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Jess in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.

A Countryman’s Winter Notebook, Adrian Bell (1:02)

Letters to Michael: a father writes to his son 1945–1947, Charles Phillipson (1:12)

The Rosemary Sutcliff Novels, Slightly Foxed Cubs. The final two in the series, The Shield Ring and Sword Song, are now available (2:00)

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon (4:18)

The Later Roman Empire, Ammianus Marcellinus (9:30)

The History of the Franks, Gregory of Tours (10:41)

Confessions, Saint Augustine (13:54)

City of God, Saint Augustine (14:46)

Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Bede (15:34)

The World of Late Antiquity, Peter Brown (17:34)

Julian, Gore Vidal (22:14)

The Dream of Scipio, Iain Pears (22:54)

The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro (23:38)

Dawn Wind, Rosemary Sutcliff (25:06)

The Long Ships, Frans G. Bengtsson (26:08)

Beowulf: A New Translation, Maria Dahvana Headley (27:13)

Sistersong, Lucy Holland (27:30)

Le Morte Darthur, Thomas Malory (30:53)

The Last Kingdom, Bernard Cornwell (32:11)

The Manningtree Witches, A. K. Blakemore (38:17)

The Balkan Trilogy, Olivia Manning (40:47)

Scaling Gibbon’s Everest, Richard Crockatt on Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Issue 68 (8:17)

A Frank Look at History, Andy Merrills on Gregory of Tours, The History of the Franks, Issue 65 (12:48)

Last of the Pagans, Patrick Welland on Gore Vidal, Julian, Issue 45 (22:50)

The Sound of Chariots, Sue Gaisford on the Roman Britain novels of Rosemary Sutcliff, Issue 63

Light in the Dark Ages, Sue Gaisford on Rosemary Sutcliff, Dawn Wind, Issue 69

Magical Talisman, Sue Gaisford on Rosemary Sutcliff, Sword Song & The Shield Ring, Issue 71

Adrift on the Tides of War, Patrick Welland on Olivia Manning’s Balkan trilogy, Issue 63 (40:47)

Barter Books, Alnwick (36:12)

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach

The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

‘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.

And we continue our travels with a trip to the Heath Robinson Museum in London, exploring the cartoonist’s imagination through electric egg poachers, Christmas cracker-pulling machines and other curious contraptions, before sharing reading recommendations for Italo Calvino’s short stories that follow the cycle of the seasons, and an enlightening experiment with fiction from Francis Spufford. (Episode duration: 43 minutes; 56 seconds) 

Books Mentioned
We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Jess in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.

Sybille Bedford: An Appetite for Life, Selina Hastings

A Visit to Don Otavio, Sybille Bedford (12:00)

A Legacy, Sybille Bedford (17:41)

The Best We Can Do, Sybille Bedford is out of print (21:23)

The Trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Sybille Bedford (21:33)

Jigsaw, Sybille Bedford (28:51)

Aldous Huxley: A Biography, Sybille Bedford is out of print (29:40)

Very Heath Robinson, Adam Hart-Davis (38:34)

Marcovaldo, Italo Calvino (39:10)

Light Perpetual, Francis Spufford (41:02)

Other available books by Sybille Bedford

Bruised, Shocked, but Elated, Selina Hastings on Sybille Bedford, A Visit to Don Otavio, Issue 69 (12:00)

A Bath with a View, Caroline Chapman on Sybille Bedford, A Legacy, Issue 38 (17:41)

Sybille Bedford on Desert Island Discs, recorded in 1998 (9.09)

Heath Robinson Museum (36:20)

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach

The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

Diamond Dagger award-winning crime novelist and president of the Detection Club Martin Edwards and Richard Reynolds, crime buyer for Heffers Bookshop and member of the Crime Writers’ Association, lead our investigation in this month’s literary podcast. Together with the Slightly Foxed team, they take a magnifying glass to the Golden Age of crime fiction, tracing its origins to the interwar years when the Detection Club was founded and discussing why the genre continues to thrill.

From relishing The Poisoned Chocolates Case and resurrecting Death of a Bookseller to the mystery of E. C. R. Lorac’s missing manuscript and meeting Baroness Orczy’s Teahouse Detective, the plot twists and turns as we collect British Library Crime Classics and celebrate Crime Queens Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Josephine Tey and others along the way. Whether enjoyed as well-crafted puzzles, social documents or guilty pleasures, detective fiction is laced with nostalgia as well as cyanide. To tie up loose ends, we finish with a visit to Agatha Christie’s holiday home, Greenway, a house fit for Hercule Poirot, and the setting of a Devonshire murder hunt in Dead Man’s Folly.

Please find links to books, articles, and further reading listed below. The digits in brackets following each listing refer to the minute and second they are mentioned. (Episode duration: 44 minutes; 56 seconds)

Books Mentioned
We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Jess in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.

Mortmain Hall and The Crooked Shore, Martin Edwards

The Murder at the Vicarage, Agatha Christie (3.57)

The Nine Tailors, Dorothy L. Sayers. (4.29)

The Red House Mystery, A. A. Milne (9.31)

The Old Man in the Corner, Baroness Orczy (10.34)

A Question of Proof, Nicholas Blake (12:09)

The Cask, Freeman Wills Crofts (14.02)

Lord Peter Wimsey, Dorothy L. Sayers (15:00)

Cards on the Table, Agatha Christie (15.39)

Tragedy at Law, Cyril Hare (16:53)

Thrones, Dominations, Dorothy L. Sayers and Jill Paton Walsh (18.03)

Portrait of a Murderer, Anne Meredith (19.38)

Bloodshed in Bayswater, John Rowland is out of print (21.38)

Death of a Bookseller, Bernard J. Farmer is due to be published in a British Library Crime Classics edition in 2022 (21:41)

A Surprise for Christmas and Other Seasonal Mysteries and Murder at the Manor: Country House Mysteries, Ed. Martin Edwards (22:35)

Two-Way Murder, E. C. L. Lorac (33.40)

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie (35.15)

Verdict of Twelve, Raymond Postgate (35.25)

And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie (35.57)

Arrest the Bishop, Winifred Peck, published by Dean Street Press (37.56)

The Poisoned Chocolates Case, Anthony Berkeley (38.42)

The Dry, Jane Harper (40.05)

Agatha Christie: A Biography, Janet Morgan (41.03)

Murder Most Civilized, Emma Hogan on Agatha Christie, the Miss Marple books, Issue 17

Vane Hopes, Victoria Neumark on the novels of Dorothy L. Sayers, Issue 32

Hauntings, Michèle Roberts on Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night, Issue 63

A Gentleman on the Case, Brandon Robshaw on Margery Allingham, the Albert Campion novels, Issue 52

The Judge’s Progress, P. D. James on Cyril Hare, Tragedy at Law, Issue 12

Lost in the Fens, Julie Welch on the detective stories of Edmund Crispin, Issue 63

British Library Crime Classics (22:36)

Dean Street Press (30:40)

Download Heffers Crime Fiction Top 100, selected by Richard Reynolds. NB The file will download automatically on click. Please check your downloads folder (35:12)

Agatha Christie’s holiday home, Greenway, in Devon (42:37)

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach

The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

‘Whether Picnic at Hanging Rock is fact or fiction, my readers must decide for themselves.’ It’s a scorching St Valentine’s Day in 1900 when three boarding-school girls and a teacher disappear during a day-trip to Hanging Rock in the arid Australian outback. Fact or fiction? Misadventure or murder? Accident or assassination? Join us on our latest literary podcast adventure as we delve into the mystery, history and hysteria of Joan Lindsay’s classic Australian Gothic novel with Kate Young, author of The Little Library Cookbook. From the slow-seeping horror of Hanging Rock to coming-of-age tales of tuck boxes and midnight feasts, high jinks and humour, Kate guides the Slightly Foxed magazine team through the school-story tradition and asks why it’s such fertile ground for fiction. On the way we visit the Chalet School, Malory Towers and St Trinian’s, and slip into darker territory with Decline and Fall, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.

In this month’s literary expedition, we take a peek inside Quentin Blake’s House of Illustration, and to finish there’s the usual wide-ranging round-up of current reading featuring: Anthony Buckeridge’s classic Jennings series of prep-school stories; Emily Danforth’s romp, Plain Bad Heroines, inspired by Shirley Jackson; and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s tale of a young girl from a rural village in Zimbabwe, Nervous Conditions.

Please find links to books, articles, and further reading listed below. The digits in brackets following each listing refer to the minute and second they are mentioned. (Episode duration: 44 minutes; 24 seconds)

Books Mentioned
We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Jess in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.

Picnic at Hanging Rock, Joan Lindsay (2:02)

The Little Library Cookbook, The Little Library Year and The Little Library Christmas, Kate Young

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark (14:14)

The Naughtiest Girl in the School, Enid Blyton (15:14)

Frost in May, Antonia White (20:37)

Decline and Fall, Evelyn Waugh (23:44)

Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro (25:17)

The Secret History, Donna Tartt (27:06)

Murder Most Unladylike, Robin Stevens (28:37)

An Experiment in Love, Hilary Mantel (30:17)

Terms & Conditions: Life in Girls’ Boarding-Schools, 1939–1979, Ysenda Maxtone Graham (30:55)

The Worst Witch, Jill Murphy (31:49

Our Lady of the Nile, Scholastique Mukasonga (33:43)

Plain Bad Heroines, Emily M. Danforth (38:53)

Nervous Conditions, Tsitsi Dangarembga (41:53)

Hazy Memories of Hanging Rock, Kate Young on Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Issue 64 (2:02)

Chalet Girls, Daisy Hay on Elinor M. Brent-Dyer’s Chalet School books, Issue 56 (16:07)

Once a Catholic . . ., Melissa Harrison on Antonia White, Frost in May, Issue 54 (20.37)

Old Girls and Very Old Girls, Nicola Shulman on Ysenda Maxtone Graham, Terms & Conditions, Issue 52 (30:55)

C. T. Jennings and the Problem of Evil, Robin Blake on Anthony Buckeridge, the Jennings books, Issue 17 (40:11)

Educating Ulyth, Ysenda Maxtone Graham on the girls’ school stories of Angela Brazil, Issue 44

The Little Library Cafe: food inspired by literature from Kate Young

Leave No Trace, Madeleine Watts on lost-children narratives in Australia, The Believer (8:36)

Friends of the Chalet School (15:51)

House of Illustration, London (36:24)

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach

The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable

Imagination, influence and the invention of infernal desire machines . . . Edmund Gordon, biographer of Angela Carter, guides the Slightly Foxed team through her colourful works and explores the wider realms of magical realism. Witty and wilfully idiosyncratic, Carter conjured sex and death from fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber, used her Somerset Maugham Award money to leave her husband and go to Japan to write, and absorbed the Latin American influences of Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez. We hear how she enlisted the Marquis de Sade as an ally of feminism, embraced pulp genres and opened doors for David Mitchell, China Miéville, Helen Oyeyemi and more, while always attending to the grammar of the folk story. And, to finish, there are the usual wide-ranging recommendations for reading off the beaten track.

Please find links to books, articles, and further reading listed below. The digits in brackets following each listing refer to the minute and second they are mentioned. (Episode duration: 42 minutes; 50 seconds)

Books Mentioned
We may be able to get hold of second-hand copies of the out-of-print titles listed below. Please get in touch with Jess in the Slightly Foxed office for more information.

The Invention of Angela Carter, Edmund Gordon (2:27)

Shadow Dance, Angela Carter (7:40)

The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, Angela Carter (8:46) 

Fireworks, Angela Carter (8:51)

The Magic Toyshop, Angela Carter (10:08)

The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter (10:27)

The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim (11:29) 

Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado (13:47) 

Nights at the Circus, Angela Carter (16:29)

One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez (25:50) 

Beloved, Toni Morrison (26:21)

Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez (27:24) 

Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, Barbara Comyns (27:37)

The Sadeian Woman, Angela Carter (29:50)

Shaking A Leg: Collected Journalism and Writings, Angela Carter (31:22)

Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories, Angela Carter (31:24)

A Card from Angela Carter, Susannah Clapp is currently out of print. A reprint is under consideration (36:12)

Extinction, Thomas Bernhard (37:06)

Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel (38:15) 

Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca, Ferdinand Mount (40:20) 

Keeping it Real, Maggie Fergusson interviews the novelist Ali Smith, Issue 54 (9:48)

Sophia Fairclough and Me, Sophie Breese on the novels of Barbara Comyns, Issue 42 (27:35)

The Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize (2:30)

Keats House, Hampstead, London (33:50)

Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No.3 in E Major by Bach

The Slightly Foxed Podcast is hosted by Philippa Lamb and produced by Podcastable