The real reader’s quar T erly
‘Good Books and Artichoke Bottoms’
no. 86 summer 2025
Editors: Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
Marketing & publicity: Steph Allen & Jennie Harrison Bunning
Subscriptions, orders & bookshops: Izzy Cole, Isabel Davies Jones, Rebecca Mackay, Jess Dalby
Cover illustration: Tim Hayward, Kingfisher, 2024
Tim Hayward lives and works in Somerset. Over time he has developed a highly individual and imaginative form of wildlife painting. His subtlety in rendering textures and colour in watercolour and gouache, and accuracy of line and form demonstrate a lifetime’s fascination and study. His paintings are collected worldwide and are held in many prominent private collections. He is represented by Jonathan Cooper, London. His work can also be seen on his website: www.timhaywardstudio.com; and on Instagram: @timhaywardartist.
Back cover fox by Ella Balaam, design by Octavius Murray, layout by Andrew Evans, colophon and tailpiece by David Eccles
© The contributors 2025
Published by Slightly Foxed Ltd
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Isbn 978-1-916803-00-8 Issn 1742-5794
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Contents
From the Editors
Good Books and Artichoke Bottoms • laura Freeman
Cora Millet-Robinet, The French Country Housewife
Hungry for Love • andreW nIXon
Nigel Slater, Toast
Teasing the Romantics • Tom hodGKInson
Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey
How the World Works • sarah perry
Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
Terror among the Wheatfields • CorIn Throsby
Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
Over the Moon • GranT mCInTyre
Andrew Chaikin, A Man on the Moon
Always the Same River • Jon WoolCoTT
Graham Swift, Waterland
Call It What You Like • CarolIne sanderson
Alexandra Fuller, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight
An Epic Undertaking • sImon sCoTT plummer
Edmund Spenser, The Fairie Queene
The Novel that Wrote Itself • JulIa Jones
Margery
Italian Hours • marGareT drabble
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun
Death and the Journalist • posy FalloWFIeld
Antonio Tabucchi, Pereira Maintains
A Haunted Life • FranCes donnelly
David Storey, Saville
Always Open to Beauty • rIChard smyTh
Richard Bell, Richard Bell’s Britain
The Glory that Rome Wasn’t • daVId FlemInG
James Leslie Mitchell, Spartacus
Credendo Vides • alasTaIr GleGG
James C. Christensen, Voyage of the Basset
At England’s Edge • KaTe morGan
Ida Gandy, An Idler on the Shropshire Borders
Bibliography
The Slightly Foxed Podcast
New episodes of our podcast are available on the 15th of April, July, October and January. To listen, visit www.foxedquarterly.com/pod or search for Slightly Foxed on Audioboom, Apple Podcasts or your podcast app.
Subscriber Benefits
Slightly Foxed can obtain any books reviewed in this issue, whether new or second-hand. To enquire about a book, access the digital edition of Slightly Foxed or view a list of membership benefits, visit www.foxedquarterly.com/ members or contact the office: 020 7033 0258/office@foxedquarterly.com.
From the Editors
June, the month when London begins to empty out and then fill up again with summer visitors, on the buses, on the underground, and in the restaurants and coffee shops around Hoxton Square. It’s the time of year when, at Slightly Foxed too, we begin to think of getting out of the office to visit bookshops in other parts of the country, or to take part in the kind of small literary festivals and book club get-togethers that are a million miles away from the high-profile sales events that the bigger literary festivals have become. We’ve had some of our most heartwarming, entertaining and sometimes eccentric experiences in village halls, country churches and occasionally private houses, where we meet up with readers and get a real sense of what’s going on in the places where they live. In fact on 20 June we two will be appearing at an afternoon event for the Two Moors Festival, at St Winifred’s Church, Manaton, on the edge of Dartmoor. So if you live in, or happen to be visiting, this lovely part of the south-west, please do come along (for details visit www.twomoorsfestival.com).
Nowhere is the delicious feeling of summer in the countryside better conveyed than by one of SF’s most popular writers, Adrian Bell. So, just a reminder that A Countryman’s Summer Notebook, along with the other three books in our quartet of Bell’s seasonal writings for the Eastern Daily Press, is still available. In this collection of short, jewellike pieces written between 1950 and 1980, he takes us into the summer countryside to linger in quiet churches, wander through country towns, and hear the voices of the craftsmen and women, the farmers and farm labourers, whose lives are rooted in the Suffolk soil.
Another favourite, A House in Flanders by Michael Jenkins, evokes
a different kind of summer, one spent by the author as a young boy with his extended family of aunts and grown-up cousins in a dignified old French country house on the edge of the Flanders plain. For a young boy from a cold and intellectual English home, the company, the warmth and the wide Flanders skies were like an awakening, and he fell boyishly in love not only with one of his cousins but with the whole place. Yet gradually another picture emerged, for the German Occupation had left its mark and in 1951 memories were still painful and raw. It’s a beautiful, subtle book, now available again as a Plain Foxed Edition.
And finally to this summer’s new Slightly Foxed Edition (see p.13), Toast by Nigel Slater, loved the country over for his companionable and colourfully written cookbooks and his weekly Observer column. It’s subtitled ‘The Story of a Boy’s Hunger’, and in it he describes the ingredients that combined to turn a boy desperate for love into the writer he is today. As Nigel tells it, it’s an emotionally harrowing story but sharply humorous too. His mother died when he was 9 of the asthma that had been triggered by his birth, leaving him guilt-ridden and exposed to the fearful rages of his father and the cold hostility of the woman who became his stepmother, for whom Nigel could feel nothing but scorn. Each short and easily digestible chapter has something edible as its title that takes us instantly back to the remote 1960s world of grilled grapefruit, Arctic Roll and Fray Bentos tinned steak and kidney pies. A real treat and a perfect holiday read.
GaIl pIrKIs & haZel Wood
Lou Tonkin
Good Books and Artichoke Bottoms
laura F reeman
Over fourteen years as a journalist, I have written more than 2,000 articles. I’ve filed book reviews, exhibition reviews, columns, features, interviews and an investigation into bubble-wrap recycling. Nothing has generated so much interest, passion and sheer steaming outrage as the piece I wrote about my love of ironing. Letters were sent to the editor of The Times, friends emailed, friends’ mothers emailed, comments poured in online, social media went mad. The world divided into those who thought I was a tragic throwback chained to an ironing board and those who, like me, felt that when life’s problems seemed insurmountable, there was comfort in a stack of handkerchiefs ironed into perfect squares.
Cora Millet-Robinet would have understood me. In her indispensable The French Country Housewife she devotes five pages to the art of ironing. She addresses the preliminaries – ‘everything that was turned inside out for washing should be turned to the right side, because it will press less well if it’s inside out and, once ironed, you cannot turn it to the right side without crumpling it’ –before moving on to the sorting of the linen, the appropriate heating of the irons, the correct temperature for the stove, the merits of different irons and their handles, the usefulness of iron-stands, the necessity of a set of smaller irons for pleats and frills, the importance of goffering, the correct wood for an ironing board (poplar with ends
Cora Millet-Robinet, The French Country Housewife (1844–5: English edition trans. Tom Jaine, 2017)
Prospect Books • Hb • 712pp • £47 • Isbn 9781909248526
of oak, topped with a piece of old tapestry or a blanket covered in serge and a very clean cloth), the use of a trestle table for stretching and folding, the correct battery of small padded shapes for putting inside puffed sleeves and the right sort of ironing gloves to allow comfortable handling of the irons without burning your hands (old linen or felt covered in leather).
I had dipped into The French Country Housewife before, but it was only after we moved house last year that I read it cover to cover. I had left a flat where I was mistress of all I surveyed (I could literally stand in the small hallway and see into the other four rooms) and arrived at a late Victorian terrace on three floors with a bathroom on the landing. For months we clambered over boxes, builders, plumbers, joiners, decorators, carpet-fitters and boiler-men. The sitting-room mantlepiece became a graveyard of takeaway coffee cups filled with cigarette ends. Dust lay an inch thick on every surface. If I took my eye off my daughter, then beginning to crawl, I would find her clutching a rusty nail, an old staple or a splinter of wood.
Spotting The French Country Housewife at the top of one of the unpacked boxes, I took it up to the loft where my husband and I were sleeping on a mattress and our daughter in her cot. Reading by the light of my phone so as not to wake her, I opened a chapter at random.
All is order and harmony at Château de la Cataudière in the commune of Availles-en-Châtellerault near Vielle in western France.
‘Château’ is a little misleading. Madame Millet-Robinet’s domain is not a grand mansion in the manner of Chambord or Chantilly, but a gentilhommière – something like a squire’s country seat – set in 100 hectares of garden, farmland and woodland. Here, Cora Robinet, married to François Millet and mother of five children, learnt to run a farm, a household and a family.
La Maison Rustique des Dames, first published in Paris in 1844–5 and later reissued in twelve updated editions, was, she wrote, ‘the fruit of my experience, not just something learned from books’.
Think Mrs Beeton à la française. The handsome volume I held was published by Prospect Books in 2017, translated and edited by the food historian Tom Jaine. Prospect specializes in food history and while there is plenty to be found here ‘concerning provisions’, it is the chapters on the ‘duties and responsibilities of a mistress of the house’ that most appeal.
I’m a sucker for a household manual. I used to lap up the housekeeping books on my mother’s shelves. There was Cheryl Mendelson’s Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House, which took the ‘broken windows’ theory of urban decline – that if you allowed broken glass, graffiti and garbage to go unchecked it would only lead to further abuse and neglect by residents – and applied it to the sittingroom and kitchen. There was Jocasta Innes’s Home Time, which acknowledged that even if one likes bohemian living, one may not like actual dirt. And there was Shirley Conran’s Superwoman, which famously argued that life was too short to stuff a mushroom. My mum, I should add, was no domestic martyr but a glass-ceilingsmashing, corporate superwoman. Millet-Robinet does not stuff mushrooms, but she does cook them into a ragout with butter, parsley, garlic, salt, pepper and soft breadcrumbs. She also serves them on fried bread (‘a much-appreciated dish’) and uses them as stuffing, cooked in backfat, for a truffled turkey.
Where Martha Stewart is laboured – life really is too short to decorate individual candy bags for Hallowe’en trick-or-treaters –Millet-Robinet is brisk, resourceful and tireless. If The French Country Housewife were only a recipe book or a manual of household hints, it would be dull fare. But Millet-Robinet peppers and salts, garlics and stuffs her book with advice, not just about how to make one’s home a pleasant place to live in, but about how to live pleasantly in it. Yes, there are chapters on the nitty-gritty (‘Privies and emptying cesspits’, ‘Eradication of bed bugs, fleas and lice’) but, really, it is a treatise on eating, resting, entertaining and taking pleasure and pride in one’s rooms and possessions. I direct you to entries
Good Books and Artichoke Bottoms
on: ‘The characteristics of a good cellar’, ‘Artichoke bottoms’, ‘Mirabelle plum jams’, ‘Quince ratafia’, ‘A box for haberdashery – A holder for yarn’, ‘Flower vases’ and the ‘Literary library’.
This is where Millet-Robinet differs from modern ‘cleanfluencers’. The dastardly Instagram algorithm, knowing I will watch videos about grout mould, feeds me reel after reel of household ‘hacks’ – what used to be known as ‘tips’ – demonstrated by women whose greatest joy appears to be scrubbing U-bends or folding knickers into rectangles so crisp they stand up on their own. Now, I like a neat knicker drawer as much as the next neurotic, but I also recognize the sheer Sisyphean tedium of cooking, cleaning, laundering and hosing the toddler down after tea. Having polished the sitting-room floorboards with one of my husband’s old socks and a pot of Cambridge beeswax, I want to sit on the sofa with a novel, occasionally looking up to admire my handiwork, not go on polishing till the end of time.
Millet-Robinet understands this. In an entry on ‘the evening hours’ she writes:
In summertime, the evening will be spent in looking after the children, supervising the garden, having a walk, reading, playing music, and just doing nothing – something which is so delicious of a warm summer’s evening. In winter, needlework, reading, music and drawing should occupy any spare time.
Millet-Robinet’s ideal library for a winter’s evening includes books on agriculture, horticulture and gardening, on the fine arts, domestic economy and medicine and on history, philosophy, religion, science, travel and theatre. There should be novels, poetry and tales from French, German, English, American, Spanish, Swedish and Russian literature. Not forgetting the Arabian Thousand and One Nights. ‘Well-chosen books’, she writes, stretch the mind, improve the soul and banish the clouds of
depression. The reader is happy, during the long hours of a winter night, to trace the wandering footsteps of an intrepid traveller, to lose herself in the dreams and fantasies of a wellloved poet, or to console herself with something uplifting, imbued with sound morals. A good book is sometimes the best of friends. It is always a wise counsellor.
I can take or leave the sound morals, but on everything else she is spot on.
Her lists are irresistible. The ideal desk should have ‘an oilcloth blotting pad (which costs two francs), an inkpot, pens, paper, gummed envelopes, sealing wax, a little candlestick, a diary, a pair of long scissors, a paper-knife, account books, a box file or folders for papers, each with a label denoting their contents’. At a desk so equipped, who could fail to dispatch the day’s duties efficiently? A guest should be shown to their bedroom immediately and ‘nothing should be omitted to ensure their comfort. The candlesticks should have candles, the ewer full of water, the washstand perfectly clean and provided with soap, eau de Cologne, almond paste, pincushion etc.’ There should be three or four towels, frequently replaced, also writing paper and pens, a nightlight, some matches, a sugar caster and a teaspoon. At dinner, the mistress should think of delicate people who may feel the cold and provide them with footstools, footmuffs or footwarmers filled with boiling water. ‘In winter, the dining-room must be heated in advance.’
She can be stern. On ornaments, for example, she admonishes: ‘On the walls you should hang family portraits or good prints. You must ruthlessly set your face against those awful lithographs that you often find, even in town drawing-rooms. In my view, there is nothing in worse taste.’ The modern woman, meanwhile, ‘utterly abhors artificial flowers’ which ‘cannot hold a candle to natural blooms’. She paints a pleasing picture of domestic bliss. ‘A lady’s bedroom should be a refuge from disturbance, a place of rest and recuperation
respected even by the family.’ Tell that to my daughter, now 2, as she empties my laundry basket, upends my handbag and bounces on my bed.
One learns a lot along the way. Dusters made with cock’s feathers are the most durable. The seed pods of nasturtiums can be pickled just as you would capers with tarragon, samphire, elderflower, cloves, peppercorns and a little garlic in the brine. A bouquet of cut flowers wrapped in cabbage leaves should stay fresh for thirty hours and arrive in perfect condition. Turk’s Turban is the best pumpkin for purées. Hot chocolate should be beaten to make it more ‘unctuous’.
I am neither romantic nor nostalgic enough to want to go back to the Millet-Robinet way of doing things. Reading the elaborate instructions for heating coppers, soaking sheets and beating linen makes me glad of my trusty washing machine and tumble dryer. I am grateful that water comes from a tap and not from a river or well. I wonder if Millet-Robinet would admire my rechargeable Dyson dust-buster or see it as a shameless cheat. In truth, I will probably never make my own pigskin andouilles or cure a lapwing salami. I cannot face the thought of gutting larks (‘the gizzard harbours stones, which are most disagreeable to encounter in the mouth’) and I do not have the patience for orange flower praline (‘carefully pick over 500 grams of orange flowers, that is to say, keep only their petals’). I am not French, I do not live in the countryside, and I am a harried working mother not a serenely starched housewife. But there is pleasure to be had in reading Millet-Robinet and profit in her methods. One day, when I have the time, when the plums are in season and no deadline looms, I will get around to her tempting Mirabelle jam.
laura Freeman is chief art critic of The Times and author of Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists. She has been known to clean the skirting boards with an old toothbrush. The illustrations in this article are by Ella Balaam.
Hungry for Love
andre W n IX on
The past is a foreign country: they eat things differently there. At a picnic, for example, they might decant a tin of slimy boiled ham on to a dinner plate and eat it with a knife and fork, along with Heinz Salad Cream served in a sauce boat. They consume jelly with evaporated milk, cucumber slices in vinegar, plates of reformed cow’s tongue – and on special occasions they might serve them all at once on a wheeled trolley. Instead of vegetables they buy instant dried peas in cardboard boxes. They grill grapefruits. They’ve never heard of hummus.
Nigel Slater’s Toast (2003) – which won six literary awards – is many things: a childhood memoir, a confession, an act of literary vengeance. But on the surface it is a very funny travelogue from the alien country that is 1960s Middle England, told through its food. Or rather, through its culinary neuroses. In the Wolverhampton home where Nigel grows up, Arctic Roll is considered ‘something of a status symbol’, while now-unfathomable snobberies forbid all manner of foodstuffs including crisps (‘frowned upon, rather like baked beans’), tomato ketchup (‘quite unmentionable, even in hushed tones’) and Wagon Wheel marshmallows (‘would never have been allowed past the front porch’). It is a weird, lost world, and Toast conjures it with a remarkable vividness thanks to a structure singularly suited to its author’s literary gifts.
With eighteen bestselling cookery books, ten television series and endless awards to his name, Nigel Slater, OBE is Britain’s most treasured food writer. He calls himself ‘a cook who writes’ – or sometimes ‘a writer who cooks’. A well-thumbed, olive oil-stained paperback of
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alasTaIr GleGG joins a gathering of literary villains • helen mCeWen remembers lockdown with Linda Kelly • sam leITh pays homage to The Once and Future King • helena drysdale follows an elegant author to Denmark • Guy sTaGG enjoys some Scenes from Clerical Life • JonaThan laW travels North with Peter Davidson • maGGIe FerGusson finds comfort in Gerard Manley Hopkins • ChrIsTIan Tyler lives it up with Goethe in Italy • bryan appleyard finds hope in a terrifying novel • ChrIs sChuler visits Nazi Germany After Midnight
