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 Blythe’s Wormingford books, Issue 40 Light Reading, Ronald Blythe on pocket-size volumes, Issue 17 A Private, Circumspect People, Maggie Fergusson on Ronald Blythe, Akenfield, Issue 11 Where There’s a Will, Andrew Lycett on Wilkie Collins, No Name, Issue 48 (56:29) Episode 38 of the Slightly Foxed podcast: Adrian Bell: Back to the Land (53:59) Episode 42 of the Slightly Foxed podcast: Jean Rhys: Voyages in the Dark (59:30)  Other links John Clare Cottage, Helpston (50:20) 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

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

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 at the University of Oxford. Together they join the Slightly Foxed editors to discuss Joseph Johnson’s life and work at St Paul’s Churchyard, the heart of England’s book trade since medieval times.   We listen to the conversation around Johnson’s dining-table as Coleridge and Wordsworth, Joseph Priestley and Benjamin Franklin, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Blake debate the great issues of the day. And we watch as Johnson embarks on a career that will become the foundation stone of modern publishing. We hear how he takes on Olaudah Equiano’s memoir of enslavement and champions Anna Barbauld’s books for children, how he argues with William Cowper over copyright and how he falls foul of bookshop spies and is sent to prison. From Johnson’s St Paul’s we then travel to Mayfair, where John Murray II is hosting literary salons with Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott, and taking a chance on Jane Austen. To complete our tour, we glimpse the anatomy experiments in the basement of Benjamin Franklin’s house by the Strand. Our round-up of book recommendations includes Konstantin Paustovsky’s The Story of a Life which begins in Ukraine, Winifred Holtby’s conversations with Wollstonecraft and Woolf, a fresh look at Jane Austen’s Emma and an evocation of the Aldeburgh coast as we visit Ronald Blythe for tea. 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. Colin Clark, The Prince, the Showgirl and Me, Slightly Foxed Edition No. 61 (1:23) Edward Ardizzone, The Young Ardizzone, Plain Foxed Edition (2:01) Daisy Hay, Dinner with Joseph Johnson: Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age (2:52) Kathryn Sutherland, Why Modern Manuscripts Matter William Cowper, The Task (15:46) William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is out of print (24:09) John Knowles, The Life and Writing of Henry Fuseli is out of print (24:12) Mary Scott, The Female Advocate; a poem occasioned by reading Mr. Duncombe’s Feminead is out of print (27:36) Slightly Foxed Cubs series of children’s books (31:52) Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (35:53) Maria Rundell, Mrs Rundell’s Domestic Cookery is out of print (46:01) Konstantin Paustovsky, The Story of a Life, translated by Douglas Smith (50:52) Joanna Quinn, The Whalebone Theatre (52:40) Jane Austen, Emma (53:16) Winifred Holtby, Women and a Changing Civilisation is out of print (54:07) Winifred Holtby, Virginia Woolf: A Critical Memoir is out of print (54:44) Winifred Holtby, South Riding (55:46) Ronald Blythe, The Time by the Sea (56:46) Related Slightly Foxed Articles Letters from the Heart, Daisy Hay on Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, Issue 51 Just Getting on with It, A. F. Harrold on William Cowper, Selected Poems, Issue 23 The Abyss Beyond the Orchard, Alexandra Harris on William Cowper, The Centenary Letters, Issue 53 ‘By God, I’m going to spin’, Paul Routledge on the novels of Winifred Holtby, Issue 32 Other Links Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare (11:42) Dr Johnson’s House, City of London (49:52) Benjamin Franklin House, Charing Cross, London (49:56) 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

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 December 1933 Paddy set off on foot to follow the course of the Rhine and the Danube, walking hundreds of miles. Years later he recorded much of the journey in A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. In these books Baroque architecture and noble bloodlines abound, but adventure is at the heart of his writing. There was to have been a third volume, but for years Paddy struggled with it. Only after his death were Artemis and Colin Thubron able to see The Broken Road into print.  The trilogy inspired Nick Hunt to follow in Paddy’s footsteps. What were country lanes are now highways, and many names have changed, but Nick found places that Paddy had visited, with their echoes of times past.  Following discussions of a love affair with a Romanian princess, Paddy’s role in the Cretan resistance in the Second World War and Caribbean volcanoes in The Violins of Saint-Jacques, we turn our focus to his books on the Greek regions of Roumeli and the Mani, and the beautiful house that Paddy and his wife Joan built in the latter, Kardamyli. And via our reading recommendations we travel from Calcutta to Kabul In a Land Far from Home, to William Trevor’s Ireland and to Cal Flynn’s Islands of Abandonment. 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.  Nella Last’s War, Slightly Foxed Edition No. 60 (1:12) Graham Greene, A Sort of Life, Plain Foxed Edition (1:18) Artemis Cooper, Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure (2:32) Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water (4:15) Nick Hunt, Walking the Woods and the Water (6:52) Patrick Leigh Fermor, The Broken Road, edited by Artemis Cooper and Colin Thubron (23:05) Patrick Leigh Fermor, Three Letters from the Andes (24:23) W. Stanley Moss, Ill Met by Moonlight (34:31) George Psychoundakis, The Cretan Runner (38:25) Patrick Leigh Fermor, The Traveller’s Tree is out of print (40:06) Simon Fenwick, Joan: Beauty, Rebel, Muse: The Remarkable Life of Joan Leigh Fermor (41:11) Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time to Keep Silence (43:24) Patrick Leigh Fermor, The Violins of Saint-Jacques (43:27) Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani (46:27) Patrick Leigh Fermor, Roumeli (46:31) Robert Macfarlane, The Gifts of Reading, inspired by A Time of Gifts Syed Mujtaba Ali, In a Land Far from Home (49:05) Taran Khan, Shadow City (51:21) Eugenie Fraser, The House by the Dvina (51:44) Cal Flynn, Islands of Abandonment (53:49) William Trevor, Fools of Fortune (55:33) Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September (56:10) Related Slightly Foxed Articles A Great Adventure, Andy Merrills on Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts; Between the Woods and the Water, Issue 38 (4:15) Off All the Standard Maps, Tim Mackintosh-Smith on Patrick Leigh Fermor, Roumeli, Issue 2 (46:31) Other Links Artemis Cooper’s website: www.artemiscooper.com  Nick Hunt’s website: www.nickhuntscrutiny.com  Siân Phillips reads from A Time of Gifts Read two extracts from A Time of Gifts: Dropping anchor at the Hook of Holland and The largest Gothic cathedral in Northern Europe ‘When I first read A Time of Gifts I felt it in my feet’: Robert Macfarlane reads from The Gifts of Reading The Leigh Fermor House in Kardamyli, Greece – Benaki Museum Artemis Cooper on the Leigh Fermor House, Condé Nast Traveller  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