Slightly Foxed Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader's Quarterly

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 Sarah’s family. So when her own family’s circumstances changed and her husband was looking for a new direction, they said goodbye to the city and moved with their two young children to Suffolk, where they found themselves taking on the running of her father-in-law’s small arable farm. It was a steep learning curve and Sarah soon realized that the farming landscape had changed dramatically from the one she remembered: ‘My grandfather Peter was a hero who fed a starving nation. Now his son Charlie, my uncle, is considered a villain, blamed for ecological catastrophe and with a legacy no one wants.’

Needing to learn more, she describes how she travelled the country, hearing moving and inspiring human stories from small farmers who are farming in a new – but completely traditional – way, working to put more into the land than they are taking out of it, relying on natural processes like crop rotation and grazing animals rather than using chemicals to give life to the soil. This is regenerative farming – a hard row to hoe but with huge potential benefits for the planet as well as for us and other species. Sarah and her husband are now practising it on their own farm.

It’s a huge and fascinating topic, and other farming books and writers are touched on – A. G. Street’s Farmer’s Glory, Adrian Bell’s Corduroy trilogy and Apple Acre, today’s James Rebanks’s English Pastoral. Other related recommendations are From Mouths of Men by the rural historian George Ewart Evans, and the delightful Rivets, Trivets and Galvanized Buckets, the story of a village hardware shop by Tom Fort.

For episode show notes, please see the Slightly Foxed website.
Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No. 3 in E Major by Bach
Hosted by Rosie Goldsmith
Produced by Philippa Goodrich

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 new presenter Rosie Goldsmith at the kitchen table to talk about the life and work of ‘little Dodie Smith’, who started writing a journal at the age of 8 and continued every day until she was 90. 

Dodie grew up among her mother’s family – an experience she brilliantly recalled in Look Back with Love. Dodie’s uncles loved the theatre and encouraged her passion for the stage, leading her to train as an actor, with limited success. After years of struggle she turned her hand to writing and soon sold her first play, Autumn Crocus, which launched her career. Success followed, along with fur coats, glittering friends, a Rolls-Royce and the arrival of Dodie’s first Dalmatian.

Then it was off to America where she and her husband spent the Second World War, joining a literary circle that included Christopher Isherwood and Aldous Huxley. Dodie was terribly homesick and longed to return to home, yet it was her exile that produced I Capture the Castle, a novel through which her nostalgia for England permeates.

We end with a round-up of New Year reading recommendations, including a recent biography of the poet John Donne, Super-Infinite by Katherine Rundell, and The Last English King by Julian Rathbone, a historical novel set in the years before the Battle of Hastings. 

For episode show notes, please see the Slightly Foxed website.
Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No. 3 in E Major by Bach
Hosted by Rosie Goldsmith
Produced by Philippa Goodrich

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. 

The man who wrote Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four defies categorization. In this quarter’s literary podcast David and Masha sift through newly discovered stashes of letters written by Orwell in the 1930s, and share personal recollections from his adopted son Richard and other living members of his inner circle to tease out fact from fiction and explore the legacy of Orwell’s life and work. 

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.


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D. J. Taylor, Orwell: A New Life (0:30)
George Orwell, A Homage to Catalonia (7:27)
Masha Karp, George Orwell and Russia (15:10)
George Orwell, Burmese Days (31:46)
George Orwell, Animal Farm (31:47)
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (31:48)
George Orwell, A Clergyman’s Daughter (34:04)
George Orwell, Why I Write (38:22)
George Orwell, ‘Confessions of a Book Reviewer’, Essays (39:56)
George Orwell, ‘Dickens’, Essays (43:45)
George Orwell, ‘Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool’, Essays (44:28)
Nicholas Fisk, Pig Ignorant (45:25)
Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year (45:42)
James Aldred, Goshawk Summer (49:10)
Edward Chisholm, A Waiter in Paris (51:38)
George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London (51:50)
Emilé Zola, The Drinking Den (53:18)
Claire Wilcox, Patch Work (55:11)

Related Slightly Foxed articles



The Nightmare of Room 101, Christopher Rush on George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Issue 69

Betrayals, Christopher Rush on George Orwell, Animal Farm, Issue 65

An Extraordinary Ordinary Bloke, Brandon Robshaw on George Orwell, Essays, Issue 56

Pox Britanica, Sue Gee on George Orwell, Burmese Days, Issue 40

All Washed Up, Christopher Robbins on George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, Issue 21

The Road to Room 101, Gordon Bowker on George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Issue 11

Other links


The Slightly Foxed Calendar 2024

Readers’ Day 2023 
The George Orwell Foundation

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

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 casts new light on the men and women who gently shaped a new way of making, seeing and living with art for the twentieth century. Laura and Andrew join Slightly Foxed Editors Gail and Hazel at the kitchen table to draw us deeper into Jim and his wife Helen’s way of life at Kettle’s Yard: a domestic home-cum-gallery where pausing to sit is encouraged and artworks, furniture, ceramics, books and found objects from the natural world live side by side in delicious harmony. We follow Laura upstairs to Helen’s sitting-room to meet Constanin Brâncuşi’s cement-cast head of the boy Prometheus, we pause in the light-filled Dancer Room to take in Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s bronze ballerina and we pass Barbara Hepworth’s strokable slate sculpture Three Personages on the landing before leafing through the bookshelves to discover hand-bound early editions of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and works by Henry James. We hear how Jim believed that art was for everyone and wasn’t just for looking at but also for touching, hearing and engaging with: a belief so central to his ethos that he would lend pieces to Cambridge University students to place in their own living spaces.
 
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.


Subscribe to Slightly Foxed magazine
Laura Freeman, Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists (0:55)
Virginia Woolf, Orlando (18:30)
Henry James, ‘The Great Good Place’ (19:46)
Richard Cobb, A Classical Education (45:34)
Adrian Bell, A Countryman’s Summer Notebook (46:00)
Lionel Davidson, The Night of Wenceslas (46:15)
Lionel Davidson, The Rose of Tibet (46:29)
Lionel Davidson, Kolymsky Heights (46:32)
Eric Carle, The Very Hungry Caterpillar (48:40)
Ann Pratchett, The Dutch House (49:18)
Osman Yousefzada, The Go-Between (50:59)

Related Slightly Foxed articles & podcast episodes


Episode 30 of the Slightly Foxed podcast: Jim Ede’s Way of Life


Living Art, Mark Haworth-Booth on Jim Ede, A Way of Life: Kettle’s Yard, Issue 42

The Pram in the Hall, Laura Freeman on Barbara Hepworth, A Pictorial Autobiography, Issue 69

Russian Roulette, Anne Boston on Lionel Davidson, Kolymsky Heights, Issue 60

High Adventure, Derek Robinson on Lionel Davidson, The Rose of Tibet, Issue 32

Other links



Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge
Jim Ede, A Way of Life: Kettle’s Yard is available from the Kettle’s Yard shop
King Charles, the then Prince of Wales, on Kettle’s Yard at their inaugural concert

Kettle’s Yard House Tour

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 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 in early 2023, will be remembered as a good writer is irrefutable. Many Slightly Foxed listeners will know and love not only Akenfield – his bestselling 1969 portrait of a fictionalized East Anglian village – and the ‘Word from Wormingford’ column for the Church Times but also his unparalleled collection of short stories, poems, histories, novels and essays and, most recently, his year-long diary published as Next to Nature, which celebrates the slow perpetual turn of the farming year, the liturgical calendar and the rhythms of village life.

In this episode Ronnie’s fellow writers and friends, Julia Blackburn and his biographer Ian Collins, lead us down the rough-hewn track to the ancient yeoman’s cottage he inherited from the artist John Nash and into the nooks and crannies of his private world, tracing a life well lived and well written. We meet the changeling boy obsessed with books and nature and the self-taught youth whose good looks and charisma caused queues at the Colchester Library reference desk where he worked until he was discovered by the painter Christine Nash. It was she, recognizing his rare talent, who insisted he leave his job to pursue writing fulltime. We track Ronnie’s rich literary life path through his friends’ personal recollections, touching on tales of mid-winter meetings with E. M. Forster and an unlikely tryst with Patricia Highsmith. We muse on his spirituality and sexuality, his great love for life and his deep connection to the rural world with all its harshness and all its beauty, before heading for Bottengoms Farm where we hear how this great man and great writer saw out his last days in the company of good books and close friends.

For our book-lovers’ day out we head to the quintessential English cottage of Ronnie’s hero, the poet and keen gardener John Clare. And, to finish, a round-up of book recommendations including another East Anglian delight in Adrian Bell’s A Countryman’s Spring Notebook, an unusual fishing memoir by the writer of the Killing Eve series that’s about much more than just fishing, and the intricately plotted revenge tale No Name by Wilkie Collins, one of Ronnie’s favourite writers.

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.
 


Subscribe to Slightly Foxed magazine
Ronald Blythe, Akenfield (0:19)
Ian Collins, Water Marks: Art in East Anglia is out of print (1:30)
Julia Blackburn, The Emperor’s Last Island is out of print (2:22)
Edna O’Brien, The Country Girls Trilogy (21.59)
Ronald Blythe, The Age of Illusion: England in the Twenties and Thirties, 1919-1940 is out of print (24:18)
Ronald Blythe, The View in Winter: Reflections on Old Age (31:06)
Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death (31:38)
Adrian Bell, Corduroy (37:30)
Ronald Blythe, Word from Wormingford (41:38)
Ronald Blythe, Next to Nature (43:36)
Nicholas Fisk, Pig Ignorant (52:54)
Adrian Bell, A Countryman’s Spring Notebook (53:59)
Luke Jennings, Blood Knots (54:11)
Luke Jennings, Codename Villanelle (54:13)
Annie Ernaux, The Years (55:15)
Wilkie Collins, No Name (55:47)
A. N. Wilson, Confessions (56:51)

Julia Blackburn gave the eulogy for Ronald Blythe at his funeral which took place at St Edmundsbury Cathedral, Bury St Edmunds on 1 March 2023. She has kindly given us permission to share the full transcript. 

Related Slightly Foxed articles & podcast episodes




Mellow Fruitfulness, Melissa Harrison on Ronald

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 being an actress. And she did play many roles over the years: raconteur, recluse, wife (three times), grieving mother, enthusiastic drinker . . . But her most important role was that of a writer.

We begin in the Caribbean with Smile Please, Rhys’s unfinished autobiography of her early years, where we meet a white creole girl who feels like an outsider. This feeling lingers, whether she is living in squalid London, on Paris’s Left Bank or in rural Devon. The women in her novels feel it too: Anna adrift in London in Voyage in the Dark, Julia leaving Paris in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Antoinette bound for Mr Rochester’s attic in Wide Sargasso Sea. The voice of Sacha rings out in a BBC radio play of Good Morning, Midnight many years after its publication, bringing Rhys into the spotlight. Embezzlement, incarcerations, fisticuffs in the street and an unsuccessful menage à trois all trouble her at times, yet she wins over many supporters along the way, among them the writer Ford Madox Ford, the editors Francis Wyndham and Diana Athill, and her loyal friend Sonia Orwell.

Then we’re back in Paris, browsing the shelves of the Shakespeare and Company bookshop, and selecting some New Year reading recommendations – post-apocalyptic science fiction by John Christopher, travels Along the Enchanted Way in Romania, and the artistic life of Alison vividly told in words and pictures by Lizzy Stewart.

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.





Subscribe to Slightly Foxed magazine
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (0:14)
Miranda Seymour, I Used to Live Here Once (0:36)
Jean Rhys, Smile Please (2:48)
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (8:10)
Jean Rhys, The Collected Short Stories, which includes the stories mentioned in this episode: ‘Let Them Call it Jazz’; ‘Vienne’; ‘Till September Petronella’; ‘I Spy a Stranger’ and many more besides (9:31)
Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark (12:00)
Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (13:47)
Jean Rhys, Quartet (22:05)
Ford Madox Ford, When the Wicked Man is out of print (22:12)
Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight (34:34)
Jean Rhys, ‘I Spy a Stranger’ can be found in The Collected Short Stories (46:04)
John Christopher, The Death of Grass(53:17)
William Blacker, Along the Enchanted Way (55:00)
Lizzy Stewart, Alison (57:55)


Related Slightly Foxed Articles






Voyage in the Dark, Patricia Cleveland-Peck on the novels of Jean Rhys, Issue 4

Not-so-gay Paree, Rowena Macdonald on Jean Rhys, Quartet and Voyage in the Dark, Issue 51
Episode 38 of the Slightly Foxed podcast: Literary Drinking (29:40)
Episode 42 of the Slightly Foxed podcast: Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure (55:25)

Other Links


Shakespeare and Company, Paris (48:45)
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