Slightly Foxed
Episodes
56: The Thrilling World of Dick Francis
15 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Wartime bomber pilot, champion jockey, racing journalist, bestselling novelist, Dick Francis truly was a legend. The Slightly Foxed team join Dick’...
55: At Home with the Brontës
15 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
There has never been a literary family quite like the Brontës. In our autumn podcast Ann Dinsdale, Principal Curator of the Brontë Parsonage Museum ...
54: The Many Lives of Muriel Spark
15 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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...
53: Dervla Murphy: A Life at Full Tilt
15 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Described as ‘the first lady of Irish cycling’, Dervla Murphy was renowned for her intrepid spirit, and she remained passionate about travel, writ...
52: William Golding: A Literary Colossus
15 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 schoo...
51: John le Carré: Secrets & Lies
15 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
‘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 ...
50: Barbara Comyns: Stranger than Fiction
15 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 li...
My Salinger Year: Joanna Rakoff & Rosie Goldsmith in Conversation
10 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
‘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 20...
49: Down to Earth: A Farming Revival
15 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Sarah Langford, author of Rooted: How Regenerative Farming Can Change the World, joins the Slightly Foxed Editors and presenter Rosie Goldsmith round ...
48: Dear Dodie
15 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
47: Aspects of Orwell
15 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
D. J. Taylor, literary critic, novelist and Whitbread Prize-winning author of the definitive Orwell: The Life and its highly acclaimed sequel The New ...
46: Return to Kettle’s Yard
15 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
45: Ronald Blythe: A Life Well Written
15 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
‘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 qu...
44: Jean Rhys: Voyages in the Dark
15 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 compellin...
43: Dinner with Joseph Johnson
15 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Bookseller, publisher, Dissenter and dinner-party host, Joseph Johnson was a great enabler in the late 18th-century literary landscape . . . Daisy Ha...
42: Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure
15 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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, an...
41: Barbara Pym and Other Excellent Women
15 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
A latter-day Austen, an academic, a romantic, a comic, a caustic chronicler of the commonplace . . . The novelist Barbara Pym became beloved and Booke...
40: Adrian Bell: Back to the Land
15 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 Be...
39: Idle Moments: Literary Loafers through the Ages and Pages
15 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In the spirit of Plato’s Symposium, the Slightly Foxed team enter into lively dialogue with two distinguished magazine editors, Tom Hodgkinson of th...
38: Literary Drinking: Alcohol in the Lives and Work of Writers
15 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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...
37: Rewriting the Script: The short life and blazing art of Sylvia Plath with her acclaimed biographer Heather Clark
15 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Heather Clark, Professor of Contemporary Poetry at the University of Huddersfield and author of the award-winning biography Red Comet, joins the Sligh...
36: Graphic Novels: A Comic Turn with Posy Simmonds & Paul Gravett
15 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The cartoonist, writer and illustrator Posy Simmonds brilliantly captures the ambitions and pretensions of the literary world, and the journalist and ...
35: Decline and Fall: A Literary Guide
15 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 rei...
34: Sybille Bedford’s Appetite for Life
15 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
‘I wondered for a time who this brilliant “Mrs Bedford” could be,’ wrote Evelyn Waugh to Nancy Mitford on reading Sybille Bedford’s first no...
33: The Golden Age of Crime Writing
15 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Diamond Dagger award-winning crime novelist and president of the Detection Club Martin Edwards and Richard Reynolds, crime buyer for Heffers Bookshop ...
32: Picnic at Hanging Rock & Other Stories
15 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
‘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 t...
31: The Magic of Angela Carter
15 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Imagination, influence and the invention of infernal desire machines . . . Edmund Gordon, biographer of Angela Carter, guides the Slightly Foxed team ...
30: Jim Ede’s Way of Life
15 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In this twentieth-century story of a quest for beauty, the writer Laura Freeman introduces us to Jim Ede, a man who, in creating Kettle’s Yard in Ca...
29: A Poet’s Haven
15 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The artist Barrie Cooke had fishing in common with Ted Hughes, and mud and art in common with Seamus Heaney. Dr Mark Wormald, a scholar on the life an...
28: An Odyssey through the Classics
15 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Daisy Dunn, historian and biographer of Catullus and Pliny, sets our scene in ancient Rome and Greece, entertaining the Slightly Foxed team with liter...
27: Dr Wiener’s Library
15 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Anthony Wells worked at The Wiener Holocaust Library in London for a decade. In this episode he leads the Slightly Foxed editors into the history of t...
26: A Winter’s Tale
15 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this seasonal episode, the Slightly Foxed team are guided through a snowstorm of winter writing over twelve centuries by the literary critic and au...
25: A Writer’s Territory
15 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The Scottish nature writer Jim Crumley takes the Slightly Foxed team on a tour of literary landscapes, from the lochs of the Trossachs and the mountai...
24: The Lives and Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb
15 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Dr Felicity James, author of Charles Lamb, Coleridge and Wordsworth: Reading Friendship in the 1790s and current custodian of Charles’s writing chai...
23: A Writer in the Kitchen
15 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The food writer and chef Olivia Potts joins the Slightly Foxed editors for a literary banquet. Olivia was a barrister for five years before enrolling ...
22: Independent Spirit
15 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Small but discerning, choosing passion over fashion, Little Toller Books shares an independent spirit with Slightly Foxed. Jon Woolcott joins us from ...
21: A Bookshelf in Tripoli
15 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Justin Marozzi, a travel writer, historian and journalist who’s lived in Somalia, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and Darfur, joins the Slightly Foxed edit...
20: An Issue of Enthusiasms
15 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Slightly Foxed Editors Gail and Hazel take us between the pages of the magazine, bookmarking articles along the way. Crack the spine of the quarterly...
19: Tim Pears’s West Country
15 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Tim Pears, a writer rooted in the landscape of Devon, takes Slightly Foxed to the West Country. From working at his local library and reading an autho...
18: The Ordeal of Evelyn Waugh
15 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The great prose stylist of the 20th century, monster, performer? Biographer and literary journalist Selina Hastings and writer and critic Alexander Wa...
17: Margaret Drabble: A Writer’s Life
15 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Dame Margaret Drabble joins us at the Slightly Foxed table as we celebrate her life in writing. From taking up her pen in the 1960s as a young mother ...
16: Moving in Royal Circles
15 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Biographer and academic Jane Ridley and screenwriter and novelist Daisy Goodwin join the Slightly Foxed Editors to reveal the wealth to be found in ro...
15: Reading Resolutions
15 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
As we turn the page to a new decade, we’ve made some New Year resolutions. John Mitchinson and Andy Miller of Backlisted Podcast join the Slightly F...
14: The Vital Spark
15 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
What sparks a lifelong love of reading? Francis Spufford, author of The Child that Books Built, and Emily Drabble of the children’s reading charity ...
13: Nature & Story
15 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In the parochial lies the universal, or does it? Join us on a trip to the British countryside as we plough into the matter of nature, landscape and th...
12: Slightly Foxed – But Still Desirable
15 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Gail, Hazel and host Philippa enter the world of second-hand bookselling with Chris Saunders of Henry Sotheran’s, the world’s oldest antiquarian b...
11: Orkney’s Prospero
15 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Gail, Hazel and host Philippa are transported to Orkney as they explore the life and works of the poet and novelist George Mackay Brown OBE. Together ...
10: From Page to Stage
15 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Just who are literary festivals for and why do we love them so much? Gail, Steph and host Philippa go backstage with Anne Oxborough of the well-establ...
9: Well-Cultivated Words
15 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Gail, Hazel and host Philippa dig into the subject of garden writing with the journalist and social historian Ursula Buchan and Matt Collins, nature w...
8: Leaving that Place called Home
15 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Hazel, Jennie and host Philippa explore the art of travel writing with the acclaimed author and biographer Sara Wheeler, and Barnaby Rogerson of the w...
7: A Window on the World
15 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Gail, Steph and Anna go behind the scenes with booksellers Brett Wolstencroft of Daunt Books and Kathleen Smith of Topping & Co. Bath to talk abou...
6: Well-Written Lives
15 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Gail, Hazel, Jennie and host Philippa are joined at the table by eminent biographer Adam Sisman to discuss the delicate business of delving into the l...
5: Revival
15 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Gail, Hazel, Anna and Donna Coonan of Virago Modern Classics gather round the table to talk about giving new life to forgotten voices, and Helen Bourn...
4: Viewing Is Essential
15 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Gail, Hazel and Jennie talk to the artist and illustrator (and master of pastiche) David Eccles about the craft of marrying image and text. The actres...
3: Stet
15 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In Episode 3: Stet, Gail, Hazel and Anna discuss the art of editing with author and creative writing teacher Sue Gee, and Helen Bourne delves into the...
2: The Oldest Paper in the World
15 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In Episode 2: The Oldest Paper in the World Gail, Hazel and Jennie talk to Frances Wood, librarian, sinologue and former head of the Chinese Collectio...
1: Kindred Spirits
15 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In the first episode of The Slightly Foxed Podcast, SF founders Gail Pirkis, Hazel Wood and Steph Allen meet author Jim Ring round the kitchen table a...
Reading off the Beaten track (Trailer)
07 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The independent-minded quarterly that combines good looks, good writing and a personal approach. Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that a...