Slightly Foxed

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

October 15, 2026 • 58 mins

There is nothing more exciting than seeing children captivated by the magic of stories, and for many of us there’s no better children’s storyteller than Rosemary Sutcliff. Rebeka Russell, publisher of Manderley Press, joins us to share her enthusiasm for the author who inspired her love of literature at a young age and reads from her favourite of Sutcliff’s many books, The Armourer’s House.

Our second g...

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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 outrage...

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April 15, 2026 • 56 mins

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...

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January 15, 2026 • 57 mins

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 wi...

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October 15, 2025 • 52 mins
There has never been a literary family quite like the Brontës. In our autumn podcast Ann Dinsdale, Principal Curator of the Brontë Parsonage Museum at Haworth in Yorkshire, joined the Slightly Foxed team to discuss the story of the family’s life there.

The Brontës moved to Haworth in 1820 when Patrick Brontë became curate, and the parsonage was established as a museum in 1928 when it was acquired by the Brontë Soc...
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July 15, 2025 • 57 mins
It’s been said that Muriel Spark’s career was not so much a life as a plot, and she did indeed repeatedly reinvent herself, closing one chapter of her life and opening another, regardless of how many friends and business associates she abandoned along the way.

This month the Slightly Foxed team were joined by Muriel Spark’s biographer Martin Stannard, and Spark enthusiast Emily Rhodes of Emily’s ...
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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 Ste...
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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 w...
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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 a...
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 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. 

Thou...
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‘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 Atl...
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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 in...
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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...
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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 arti...
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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 die...
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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...
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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 English ...
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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. 

Equipped with a gift for languages, a love of Byron and a rucksack full of notebooks, in ...
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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 Revi...
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