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Slightly Foxed

Slightly Foxed

By: Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader's Quarterly
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 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


Slightly Foxed Ltd. Art Literary History & Criticism
Episodes
  • 56: The Thrilling World of Dick Francis

    56: The Thrilling World of Dick Francis
    Jan 15 2026

    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 with horses and riding was in his blood, though he didn’t become a professional jockey until he was 26, an age when many jockeys are retiring. But he quickly became one of the most successful National Hunt jockeys (and Champion Jockey in 1953–4), riding winners for top owners including the Queen and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. And it was the spectacular collapse of the Queen Mother’s horse Devon Loch beneath him on the point of winning the Grand National in 1956 that finally persuaded Dick to retire from racing and begin a new career, first as a journalist and then as a writer of endlessly inventive crime fiction.

    So how did he do it? The novels, with their evocative titles – Dead Cert, Decider, Bolt, Hot Money – take you straight into the world of old-fashioned racing with its toffs and touts and inevitable shady characters. According to Felix, the writing of them was always a partnership, with Dick, a born storyteller, producing the plots and the atmosphere and his wife Mary as brilliant researcher and editor. Felix, too, helped with writing and research, and after Dick’s death in 2010 he was persuaded by Dick’s literary agent to keep the Francis ‘brand’ alive. He is now the author of 19 bestselling ‘Dick Francis’ novels, bringing the racing scene up to date with a female jockey as the heroine of his latest, Dark Horse.

    Along with Dick Francis’s story of talent, courage and sheer determination – one he told himself in his autobiography The Sport of Queens – the team enjoyed added anecdotes and insights into the world of racing from ‘Tommo’, and an ending that had us on the edge of our seats.
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    58 mins
  • 55: At Home with the Brontës

    55: At Home with the Brontës
    Oct 15 2025
    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 Society. Mrs Brontë and the oldest two daughters, Maria and Elizabeth, died there from tuberculosis, leaving Charlotte, Emily, Anne and their brother Branwell to be educated at home by their widowed father.

    Ann talks about her work at the Parsonage Museum, a treasure trove of Brontë memorabilia, containing 9,000 items including clothes, letters, first editions and the sisters’ own writing boxes. The Brontës were a close-knit family, sharing their games and creating a rich imaginary world which formed the basis of their later writing. Patrick Brontë was a loving and in many ways an unconventional father, who encouraged the girls’ education and allowed them to read freely. He was a lover of the natural world, and on their daily walks in the wild moorland country around Haworth the sisters absorbed the atmosphere that would permeate their novels.

    Recognition came in 1847 when each published a novel, though initially they hid behind the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. Charlotte’s Jane Eyre was the first, an overnight sensation which was the talk of literary London, causing endless speculation about the identity of its author. Three months later came Emily’s Wuthering Heights, which shocked readers with its story of passion, violence and revenge, and finally Anne’s Agnes Grey. The scene could have been set for brilliant literary careers, but within two years both Emily and Anne were dead from tuberculosis, Emily at 30 and Anne at 29. Charlotte married her father’s curate, lived on to write Shirley and Villette, based on her time as a teacher in a school in Brussels, and died at 38. Branwell, who never fulfilled his family’s high expectations, died addicted to alcohol and opium when he was 31.

    Even before Charlotte’s death Haworth had become a place of pilgrimage for Brontë fans, and Mrs Gaskell’s 1857 biography of her helped to establish the family’s lasting fame. Today the Parsonage Museum is hugely popular with visitors. It is also a centre for research and runs an annual festival of women’s writing. Ann’s deep knowledge of the Brontës and her experience of running the museum made for a fascinating discussion, leaving us to wonder, had the sisters lived longer, what their eventual literary legacy might have been.

    Autumn book recommendations were Blythe Spirit, Ian Collins’s biography of Ronald Blythe, The Brothers York by Thomas Penn, Plainsong, an American novel by Kent Haruf, Traitor’s Legacy by S. J. Parris, and The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller.

    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
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    52 mins
  • 54: The Many Lives of Muriel Spark

    54: The Many Lives of Muriel Spark
    Jul 15 2025
    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 Walking Book Club, to discuss the work of this highly original and somewhat forgotten writer and learn how Muriel first invited Martin to write her biography and then did her best to prevent it seeing the light of day.

    Born in 1918, Muriel grew up in a working class family in Edinburgh – the setting for her most famous novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which was based on a charismatic teacher at her own school. At the age of 19 she closed that chapter of her life by marrying an older maths teacher, Sydney Oswald Spark, known (appropriately) thereafter as SOS, and going with him to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) where their son Robin was born. Unfortunately it soon became obvious that Sydney had severe psychiatric problems and in 1943 Muriel left husband and son and returned to London where she began her career as a novelist.

    Several times shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and much admired by Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, Muriel produced 22 novels, most of them drawing on events in her own life. Everyone at the Slightly Foxed table had their favourites, including The Girls of Slender Means, A Far Cry from Kensington, Loitering with Intent, and Memento Mori, a clear eyed and also very funny look at old age. Everyone agreed on the brilliance of her writing with its dark humour, preoccupation with the supernatural and with the presence of evil in unlikely places.

    Her life was equally fascinating, moving from poverty to great wealth and success, and from the shabbier parts of London to intellectual life in New York centred on The New Yorker magazine, to which she became a contributor. In 1954 she was received into the Roman Catholic church and for some time she lived in Rome, relishing the glitter of Italian high society, finally settling in Tuscany with her friend Penelope Jardine, where she died in 2005.

    Summer reading recommendations included Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan, Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson, Homework by Geoff Dyer and Of Thorn and Briar by Paul Lamb. Martin also praised Electric Spark, the new – and very different – biography of Muriel Spark by Frances Wilson.

    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
    Show More Show Less
    58 mins
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I am so pleased to have stumbled across the Slightly Foxed podcast. It is such a treat to listen to knowledgeable people chatting in such an informal way about books I have never heard of. My list of books to look out for in secondhand bookshops grows with every episode I listen to.

What a Delight!

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