Slightly Foxed
The independent-minded book review magazine that combines good looks, good writing and a personal approach. Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal. Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it’s more like a well-read friend than a literary magazine. Come behind the scenes with the staff of Slightly Foxed to learn what makes this unusual literary magazine tick, meet some of its varied friends and contributors, and hear their personal recommendations for favourite and often forgotten books that have helped, haunted, informed or entertained them. For more information about Slightly Foxed visit: foxedquarterly.com
Episodes
April 15, 2025 • 59 mins
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.
Gail Pirkis and Steph Allen, ...
Gail Pirkis and Steph Allen, ...
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January 15, 2025 • 59 mins
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.
Golding was a fascinating and often troubled man, a voracious reader who enjoyed the Odyssey in Greek as well as Georgette Heyer and Jilly Cooper and was a...
Golding was a fascinating and often troubled man, a voracious reader who enjoyed the Odyssey in Greek as well as Georgette Heyer and Jilly Cooper and was a...
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October 15, 2024 • 51 mins
‘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.
Graham Greene, whom le Carré greatly admired, on...
Graham Greene, whom le Carré greatly admired, on...
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July 15, 2024 • 56 mins
Any mention of Barbara Comyns usually brings an ‘I know the name but I don’t know anything about her’ kind of response. In this quarter’s literary podcast, presenter Rosie Goldsmith and the Slightly Foxed Editors sit down with Barbara’s biographer Avril Horner and Brett Wolstencroft, Manager of Daunt Books, to discover who this fascinating and forgotten novelist really was.
Though Barbara enjoyed success in the late...
Though Barbara enjoyed success in the late...
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May 10, 2024 • 57 mins
‘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), joins us down the line from her home in Massachusetts for a conversation with our podcast presenter Rosie Goldsmith.
From their respective sides of the Atlantic, Ros...
From their respective sides of the Atlantic, Ros...
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April 15, 2024 • 46 mins
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 to become a farmer, and about the woman who was her inspiration: Eve Balfour, the extraordinary aristocrat, founder of the Soil Association and author of The Living Soil.
Farming was ...
Farming was ...
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January 15, 2024 • 54 mins
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 quarter’s literary podcast, coinciding with the revival of her play Dear Octopus at the National Theatre, Dodie’s biographer Valerie Grove joins the Slightly Foxed Editors and ne...
In this quarter’s literary podcast, coinciding with the revival of her play Dear Octopus at the National Theatre, Dodie’s biographer Valerie Grove joins the Slightly Foxed Editors and ne...
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October 15, 2023 • 58 mins
D. J. Taylor, literary critic, novelist and Whitbread Prize-winning author of the definitive Orwell: The Life and its highly acclaimed sequel The New Life, and Masha Karp, Orwell scholar, former Russian features editor at the BBC World Service and author of George Orwell and Russia, join the Slightly Foxed team at the kitchen table in Hoxton Square to take a fresh and deeply personal look at the life and work of George Orwell....
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July 15, 2023 • 54 mins
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.
Jim Ede was a man for whom art, books, beauty, friendship and creativity were essential facets of a happy and fulfilled life and, in her acclaimed group biography of Jim and his artists, Laura...
Jim Ede was a man for whom art, books, beauty, friendship and creativity were essential facets of a happy and fulfilled life and, in her acclaimed group biography of Jim and his artists, Laura...
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April 15, 2023 • 59 mins
‘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...
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...
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January 15, 2023 • 59 mins
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 ...
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 ...
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October 15, 2022 • 59 mins
Bookseller, publisher, Dissenter and dinner-party host, Joseph Johnson was a great enabler in the late 18th-century literary landscape . . .
Daisy Hay is the author of Dinner with Joseph Johnson: Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age and Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Exeter, and Kathryn Sutherland is the author of Why Modern Manuscript Matters and Senior Research Fellow in Englis...
Daisy Hay is the author of Dinner with Joseph Johnson: Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age and Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Exeter, and Kathryn Sutherland is the author of Why Modern Manuscript Matters and Senior Research Fellow in Englis...
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July 15, 2022 • 59 mins
Paddy Leigh Fermor was just 18 when he set forth from the Hook of Holland, bound for the Golden Horn . . .
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.
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April 15, 2022 • 57 mins
A latter-day Austen, an academic, a romantic, a comic, a caustic chronicler of the commonplace . . . The novelist Barbara Pym became beloved and Booker Prize-nominated in the late twentieth century, yet many rejections, years in the literary wilderness and manuscripts stored in linen cupboards preceded her revival.
Paula Byrne, author of The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym, and Lucy Scholes, critic, Paris ...
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February 15, 2022 • 42 mins
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.
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January 15, 2022 • 46 mins
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 wr...
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December 15, 2021 • 41 mins
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 ritua...
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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 us...
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October 15, 2021 • 44 mins
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...
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September 15, 2021 • 42 mins
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.
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