Secret Life of Books
Every book has two stories: the one it tells, and the one it hides. The Secret Life of Books is a weekly podcast starring Sophie Gee, an English professor at Princeton University, and Jonty Claypole, formerly director of arts at the BBC. Each week they take an iconic book and reveal the hidden story behind the story: who made it, their clandestine motives, the undeclared stakes, the scandalous backstory, and the secret, mysterious meanings of books we thought we knew.
Episodes
The Odyssey 3: Tennyson's Ulysses
Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses” might just be the greatest Odyssey re-write of all time, even though it starts several years after Homer’s mighty epic ends. “Ulysses” is a dramatic monologue in blank verse in which the aging Ulysses prepares to leave Ithaca for one last voyage into the unknown. Its famous last line - to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield - inspired Victorians - and continues
The Odyssey 2: How the Odyssey conquered the world
We’re in another SLoB code red. Only months after Wuthering Heights smashed onto our screens, Christopher Nolan is here for the blockbuster event of the season, taking the one of the oldest and still greatest epics of all time - Homer’s Odyssey - and giving it what it always lacked. That is to say: Matt Damon. And not just Matt Damon, but Zendaya, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Travis Scott, Rob
The Odyssey 1: Mary Beard on Homer’s masterpiece
To kick-start our series on the Odyssey, we're republishing a hit episode from early SLOB: a conversation with Dame Mary Beard, the world's favorite classicist.The Odyssey - where stories began. Probably written down around 7th century BC - give or take a few centuries either way - by somebody or somebodies who may or may not have been called Homer. Leaving aside these mysteries, what is the Odyss
The Declaration of Independence at 250
It’s been called most influential document ever signed. And it’s been called tokenistic and compromising, a piece of writing written by a committee. The great political economist Jeremy Bentham called it “a "hodge-podge of confusion and absurdity in which the thing to be proved is all along taken for granted.” The Declaration of Independence was drafted by the lawyer, philosopher and statesma
TS Eliot 2: The Waste Land
After the triumph of Prufrock and other Observations, TS Eliot almost steered the car into the ditch, poetically and personally. Under the influence of his friend, the fascist poet Ezra Pound - a man who later achieved notoriety for his enthusiastic support of Hitler during the Second World War - Eliot’s second collection of poems reveled in antisemitism, misogyny and willful obscurity. He even wr
TS Eliot 1: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
T.S. Eliot was a mid-west American living in London in the first decades of the 20th century, who wrote Dickens-inflected poems about fog, wind, damp evenings and the general gloom of English life (if you were a young, neurotic, over-educated, American male, that is). Eliot’s remembered in the same breath as Ezra Pound as a founding father of literary Modernism, but while very few people coul
Bleak House by Charles Dickens - SLoB Book Club returns! (feat. Bret Walker SC)
SLoB Book Club is back as Sophie and Jonty dive into Charles Dickens’ Bleak House with the help of special guest Bret Walker, SC – one of Australia’s most renowned lawyers.Dickens’ sprawling vision of a nation caught in the fog of corruption, in which human kindness and connection is almost but never quite extinguished, is as relevant today as ever. It contains some of his greatest characters - in
Sucking the Forbidden Fruit: Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market
Nobody expects the Victorian wombats! Given the title, listeners won’t be hugely surprised to hear there are goblins in today’s episode, but wombats!?!?Yes, the sleeper hits of this episode are our round, furry friends from Australia. Or, as the poet Christina Rossetti would put it in a poem to her family pet, gli umobatti. “Goblin Market” is already going to 11 on the weirdness scale, and we’ve s
Wings and Things: John Keats' Ode to a Nightingale
In April 1819, the poet John Keats, aged 23, told his brother George that he was done with poetry. A few days later, he smashed out the first poem in what is arguably the greatest streak in literary history, with "La Belle Dame Sans Merci." This was followed in quick succession by four odes, including "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode to a Grecian Urn." And then as summer faded, he had a thing to sa
Paths of Glory: Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
In 1751, a little-known Cambridge academic called Thomas Gray published “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” and became a household name. His poem was a funeral elegy about the sun going down over the graves of long-forgotten people whom Gray didn’t know. They happened to be buried in the same small country churchyard as his aunt and mother (and, eventually, himself), in the village of Stoke Po
Literary Pilgrimage in New York: From the Mixes Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
A special collaboration between Sophie and the celebrated writer and podcaster Gretchen Rubin, of Happier with Gretchen Rubin, recorded live from New York City. Join Sophie and Gretchen on a literary pilgrimage to the Upper East Side of New York, where they celebrate a shared favourite children's book, From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, by the extraordinary E.L Konigsburg.Sophie
Canterbury Tales (General Prologue) by Geoffrey Chaucer
Talent shows like The X Factor, Got Talent and their many spin offs began in the 1380s, not the 1980s! They were invented by Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote his masterpiece The Canterbury Tales at the end of a successful and glamorous diplomatic career in medieval Europe.This is the literary pilgrimage to top all literary pilgrimages, the imagined story of a group of medieval odds and sods, who meet u
The Other Bennet Sister with author Janice Hadlow
2026 is the year of the Horse. It is also the Year of Classic Literature, thanks to the current crop of high-profile screen adaptations. And, when it comes to the classics, SLOB is all about the small screen. Most film directors have enormous egos. All too often they use a classic as a departure point to - frankly - just show off. To try and show they are as brilliant as the author. And we do
Back to School 4: Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld
To round out our series on high school novels we're jumping across the pond (aka the Atlantic Ocean) and skipping several decades to find ourselves in early 1990s Massachusetts. Welcome to the world of East Coast preppy culture, where Laura Ashley dresses, LL Bean canvas tote bags, goldfish crackers, classic rock, pink shorts and ties with whales on them, reign supreme. As with the other thre
Back to School 3: A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines
Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.In 1969, six years before the Sex Pistols formed and punk broke, a 15 year old boy from Yorkshire called Billy Casper flicked at v-sign at the world. A photograph of that moment became
Back to School 2: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Published in 1961, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie tells the story of a charismatic and narcissistic teacher in a girl’s private school in Edinburgh during the 1930s. Miss Brodie, who insists repeatedly that she is in the prime of her life - aka middle-aged - cultivates a ‘set’ of impressionable young girls who she can use as proxies to act out her own desires. On at least one occasion, when she enc
Back to School 1: Tom Brown's School Days
Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s School Days (1857) wasn’t the first school fiction novel – that honour goes to a Sarah Fielding, sister of Henry Fielding, who published The Governess, or The Little Female Academy over a hundred years earlier. But, as is so often the case, it’s the man who takes the credit.In this episode, Sophie and Jonty look at how Thomas Hughes’ nostalgic celebration of Rugby School
The Secret Life of (Literary) Honeymoons
From the outset, there’s only one kind of honeymoon in classic literature, and it's disastrous. Honeymoons don't become fixed stars in the literary firmament until the early nineteenth century, but they begin as they go on - badly. The first literary honeymoon of the century is Maria Bertram's ill-fated tour with the fatuous Mr. Rushworth in Mansfield Park, with her jealous sister Julia Bertram th
Beowulf: Inside the Anglo-Saxon mind
'Although he was a brave and noble warrior, he did not often slay his own friends while drunk'. In this episode, Sophie and Jonty dive deep into the manosphere - aka Anglo-Saxon England - to look at one of foundational stones of English literature (although you need a bilingual dictionary to read it in the original). Composed sometime around the 8th Century CE, but not written down until much late
"On Morrison": a conversation with Namwali Serpell
To close out our popular series on the great American novelist Toni Morrison, SLOB brings listeners a wonderful discussion with the novelist and Harvard literature Professor Namwali Serpell. Namwali is in the middle of book tour, having just published her highly acclaimed book of essays, "On Morrison," which garnered national and international attention for offering new ways to read and appreciate
Toni Morrison 3: Beloved
Beloved, published in 1987, was Toni Morrison’s fifth novel and instantly seen to be an all-time landmark of American literature, winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Sophie and Jonty continue their Morrison series by asking what makes Beloved so original, how the novel sets out to depict Black experience as never before, and - a favourite topics on SLOB – what, really, is the ‘ghost’ that
SLoB Goes to the Oscars: Frankenstein vs Hamnet
It’s Oscars week!The golden statues will get dished out on Sunday evening in Los Angeles and the world will be watching. Literary classics are big, yet again. Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein and Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet have received multiple nominations, and Jesse Buckley has already won BAFTA and Golden Globe for her performance as Anges, aka Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife. Where do new ada
Saved from Fire: the Toni Morrison Archives
As part of our series on the writing of Toni Morrison we’re lucky enough to record a conversation with one of the world’s leading Toni Morrison scholars, Professor Autumn Womack. Autumn has spent more time with the Morrison Papers at Princeton University than pretty much anyone else – except (maybe) Morrison herself.Autumn describes the experience of coming to Morrison’s writing for the first time
Toni Morrison 2: Song of Solomon
Song of Solomon (1977) propelled Toni Morrison into mainstream recognition as a major American writer, not just of her own generation but all generations, past present and to come. Song tackled something close to the “whole” of African American history, weaving multi-generational stories that included Africa itself, the southern landscapes of plantation slavery and the Civil War, and the post-abol
The Other Bronte Girl: Anne Bronte's Tenant of Wildfell Hall
With all the fuss and fanfare around Wuthering Heights, we’re worried Emily Bronte is getting more than her fair share of attention. So today we shift the SLOB-light to her younger sister Anne, author of the remarkable The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, published in 1848. Anne wrote it in a whirlwind after the successes of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, determined to prove herself a Bronte in talent a
Jane Austen's Birthday: why everyone wants to party with Jane
A special bonus episode about the blockbuster phenom of Jane Austen’s 250th Birthday celebrations. Sophie’s guest is Professor Devoney Looser, one of the world’s leading Austen scholars, and the author of the brilliant Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane, about the unscripted, occasionally unhinged world that Jane Austen really knew, and which influenced her writing.We talk
Emerald Fennell's "Wuthering Heights": is the hype worth it?
Best Valentine’s Day ever! SLOB’s “Wuthering Heights” watch-party. Sophie and Jonty take it character by character – inanimate characters included — to decide who are the winners and who are the losers in the Fennell-Robbie-Elordi mash-up adaptation of Emily Bronte’s novel. And in the episode’s gripping second half they move onto the really meaty questions: race, class, sex, domestic violence, and
Wuthering Heights: Is this really the greatest love story of all time?
The storm clouds are gathering in anticipation of the Valentine’s Day release of Emerald Fennell’s raunchy film adaptation of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. The film has been described by one critic as “very horny, very sumptuous, and very demented.” Margot Robbie looks set to change the way we read this beloved classic, well, if not forever, for a few weeks during awards season.It’s fair to sa
Frankenstein in Oxford: A Conversation with Richard Ovenden, OBE
Sophie talks to Richard Ovenden, OBE, the 25th Bodley’s Librarian at Oxford, about the manuscript of Frankenstein, one of the most extraordinary, and fascinating, literary treasures of all time. Richard is head of Oxford’s Bodleian, as well as the University's libraries, museums, and even botanical gardens. Though Richard isn’t personally dusting off the attic vases or planting the bulbs, he does
Toni Morrison 1: The Bluest Eye
Published in 1970, written by an unknown new writer, The Bluest Eye is the great African American novelist Toni Morrison’s debut. It remains in many ways her most radical. It’s one of the most banned books in America since its publication – for its unflinching, explicit depictions of domestic abuse, racial and sexual violence in small town America. Morrison wrote openly about Black sex and Bl
Queens of Crime 4: The Tiger in the Smoke by Margery Allingham
A serial killer on the loose in the foggy, battle-scarred streets of London after the Second World War. Margery Allingham's The Tiger in the Smoke (1952) is Bleak House meets 1984 meets Silence of the Lambs. In this last in the current Queens of Crime series, Sophie and Jonty looks at how Allingham - more, perhaps, than the other Queens of Crime - evolved her craft to suit the changing world aroun
To See or Not to See? Hamnet tune-up session
With the release of Chloe Zhao's rapturously acclaimed film Hamnet, adapted from Maggie O'Farrell's much-loved 2020 novel, SLOB re-releases one of our earliest episodes.Hamnet is a beautiful, lyrical novel about Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare's wife, and the early death of their son, Hamnet. O'Farrell refocussed Shakespeare's story on the women who are usually only glimpsed at the edges of his life, r
Queens of Crime 3: A Murder is Announced by Agatha Christie
A Murder is Announced (1950) was Agatha Christie’s 50th published book. So when better than the 50th anniversary of her death to celebrate one of her greatest works - and introduce Miss Marple into the back SLobalogue? In this third episode in our Queens of Crime series, Sophie and Jonty skip daintily from one side of the Second World War to the other to see if - and how - Agatha Christie’s plots
Queens of Crime 2: Vintage Murder by Ngaio Marsh
This week, for the second of our episodes on the Queens of Crime, we travel by steamer with Ngiao Marsh and her celebrated detective Roderick Alleyn, who decides to go on holiday in Marsh's native New Zealand — no trivial undertaking for an Englishman in the 1930s. Alleyn comes to NZ for the mountains and rivers, but stays for the bloody and highly innovative murder of a theater impressario, whose
The Golden Age of Crime with Grantchester's James Runcie
James Runcie is author of the acclaimed Grantchester Mysteries - the focus of six books and a hugely successful ITV television series - following vicar-sleuth Sidney Chambers in his sleuthing career from the early 1950s to the late 1970s. James talks to Jonty about where he finds the gold in the Golden Age of Crime. In particular, Dorothy L Sayers, Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr. He then ta
Queens of Crime 1: Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers
Last year, the SLoBlight lingered briefly on Agatha Christie when we celebrated the centenary of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd from 1925. This book, more than any other, heralded the start of the so-called Golden Age of Detective Fiction between the two world wars. Taught, short and fraught with menace, these novels were in large part a response to the chaos and brutality of the First World War
By George (Eliot) She's Done It! The road to Middlemarch
George Eliot’s Middlemarch is the Mount Everest of Victorian fiction. A book so brilliant and monumental that it’s taken us a year of planning to take it on. But as we close out 2025, we’ve established our Middlemarch base camp and started the climb.To put it another way, we’ve recorded an episode in which we treat listeners to the story behind the story of the greatness that is Mary Ann Evan
A SLoB Christmas Cracker
It won't come as a surprise to SLOB fans that the literary classics invented Christmas.But if you've got your finger on the buzzer and are already mouthing the words "Dickens, A Christmas Cracker" think again.We take you back to Christmas Eve, somewhere in North Wales, around about 1385 (brrrr). Cue the giant, jolly yet murderous Greene Knight, who shows up in the local mead hall, and issues a com
The Women Who Made Jane Austen
Unless you've been living under a rock, you'll know that Jane Austen has a big birthday this week -- her 250th to be exact. Happy Birthday Jane!Over here on SLOB we're throwing Jane a party, and we've invited guests. They're truly the guests of honor. The women who made Jane Austen. You may not know all of their names, or any of them. We introduce some literary superstars from their own day, who i
Big Cat Theory: William Blake's The Tyger
Are you a cat-person or a tyger-person? William Blake was both. Find out why such a big fuss about "The Tyger," which never fails to show up in google searches for the best poem in English. "The Tyger" has a lot going for it: short, punchy, mystical and definitely about a tiger. But beyond that, everything is up for grabs. Who was this William Blake, not just one of the most loved poets of all tim
Henry James 3: Turn of the Screw
Stephen King and Shirley Jackson agree that The Turn of the Screw is the GOAT of ghost-stories. It’s a gripping, excellently creepy potboiler about a mad governess and a pair of haunted children in a scary Victorian country house.Henry James already had 14 novels and a load of short fiction behind him when he wrote The Turn of the Screw, and he channeled his talent for opaque, ambiguous storytelli
Henry James 2: Colm Tóibín on Henry James
One of the world's favorite novelists, on his own favorite novelist. Colm Toibin has written many beloved novels, for which he has won many prestigious prizes. The novels include Brooklyn and Long Island; The Magician and The Master. This last is Colm's fictional recreation of Henry James' extraordinary career-save in which he bounced back from the failure of his West End play, Guy Domville, to wr
Henry James 1: The Portrait of a Lady
Many readers consider The Portrait of a Lady to be the greatest novel in English. But for some reason, James' fellow novelists loved to dump on him. Nabokov called him a "pale porpoise," and said his books were strictly for "non-smokers." Virginia Woolf, who knew him as a family friend, wrote, "we have his works here, and I read them, and can’t find anything but faintly tinged rose water, urbane a
Greece Lightnin': My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell
SLoB is turning 1! To celebrate, Sophie and Jonty re-read one of their all time favorites, My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell.My Family and Other Animals (1956) is the beloved, hilarious, brilliant chronicle of a childhood idyll — which is also a series of comic disasters — set on the Ionian Greek Island of Corfu.The memoir is the first part of a trilogy that includes Birds, Beasts and
American Horror 3: Salem's Lot by Stephen King
Salem’s Lot (1975) is Stephen King’s second published novel, and many would say it's his best. It tells the story of a plague of vampires running amok in a blue-collar town in New England and the band of heroes who come together to fight them. We’re aware that many listeners may not have read a Stephen King novel, although they will probably have seen - and enjoyed - a film adaptation,
American Horror 2: Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin
Chocolate Mouse, anyone? Rosemary’s Baby was a smash hit on release - the best selling horror novel of the 1960s, eventually selling over 4 million copies. The year after publication it was adapted into one of the greatest films of the decade - directed by Roman Polanski with Mia Farrow as the eponymous heroine. At first glance, it seems that Ira Levin’s story was at odds with the preva
American Horror: The Haunting of Hill House
Who's afraid of American horror? Sophie and Jonty, for starters. To celebrate halloween, SLOB is taking a deep dive into three classics of the American Horror genre. We've chosen novels published after 1945, and we're asking how the war - and its many aftershocks and resonances in American domestic and political life - transformed horror as a literary genre. We won't spoil the surprises by te
Montaigne pt2: A Montaigne out of a mole hill (with Rowan Tomlinson)
Jonty and Sophie were separated by an ocean while Sophie and her family went back to New York and Jonty stayed in Sydney - so they made lemonade out of life's lemons, and created two miniature episodes about the great 16th-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne.Montaigne isn't just any old essayist — he's the man who invented the form, with three volumes of brilliant, surprising, constantly f
Montaigne pt1: Climb Every Montaigne (with Stephen Greenblatt)
Sophie talks to one of the world's leading literary scholars, who co-founded a whole branch of literary studies known as "The New Historicism," before reinventing Shakespeare for new generations of readers, and then turning the Roman poet Lucretius into an (almost) household name. Stephen Greenblatt is professor of English at Harvard University, he's a Pulitzer Prize winner and the author of Will
SLoB's Four (literary) weddings and a funeral
The label says what's in the tin: Secret Life of Books dives deep into weddings and funerals in literature, asking why they become iconic moments to hang a story on. Family strife, betrayal, love, passion, disappointment and hope are all bound up in these major life events where we see characters' true colors and desires writ large.-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbo
Wilkie Collins 2: The Moonstone
With The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins published yet another giant sensation, this time pioneering the detective novel and mystery/heist genre. It was published in 1868 and serialised - just as The Woman White was - in Dickens’ All the Year Round, making it one of the most popular books of Victorian Britain. Jonty and Sophie will show how The Moonstone gave the world most of the key ingredients of the
BONUS: Jennifer Egan on the Woman in White
As part of our ongoing “That’s Classic!” series, we're joined by the wonderful Jennifer Egan to chat about the sensational thriller The Woman in White.Jennifer is one of the most loved, admired and critically acclaimed writers in America, with fans all over the world. Jennifer is a Pulitzer Prize winner and was President of the vitally important PEN America. She's the author of many books, includi
Wilkie Collins 1: The Woman in White
The Woman in White was a sensation when it was serialised in Charles Dickens’ magazine All The Year Round in 1859 and 1860. It begins with an uncanny late-night meeting on the road to London between a young man and a woman dressed entirely in white. It ends with a sensational cat and mouse game between a villain and his pursuers. One of the unsung secrets of Wilkie Collins's novel is the brilliant
SLOB Reads: The Sonnet with Paul Muldoon
For several weeks we've been recording a subscribers-only mini series on the history of the sonnet in English. Sonnets are crowd-pleasers - short, sometimes sweet, and they always deliver a lot of bang for the reading buck.Today, one of the world's great living poets, Paul Muldoon, Pulitzer Prize winner and former poetry editor of the New Yorker, joins us to talk about the pleasures and challenges
The Secret Life of Trains: how rail travel changed fiction - for ever
It was five o’clock on a winter’s morning in Syria. Alongside the platform at Aleppo stood the train grandly designated in railway guides as the Taurus Express. So Agatha Christie began her sleeper [car] hit, Murder on the Orient Express (1934).All aboard! In the latest of SLoB's much-loved special episodes on surprising, fun, and always deeply revealing literary themes, Sophie and Jonty take an a
BONUS: Writing Virginia Woolf's life (with Hermione Lee)
In this final episode in SLoB's series on Virginia Woolf, Jonty talks to literary biographer Hermione Lee whose Virginia Woolf (1996) is perhaps the most respected account of her life and art in a world not short on them. Hermione talks about the challenges in writing about somebody who had such firm views on what a biography should and shouldn't be. Woolf's father, Leslie Stephen, was, after all,
Virginia Woolf 5: The Waves
We thought we’d be concluding our Virginia Woolf deep-dive with "A Room of One’s Own," but we’ve enjoyed this series so much we decided to extend. Today we’re looking at the book which many Woolf obsessives consider her masterpiece. Woolf published The Waves in 1931, just two years after her string of masterpieces, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and “A Room of One’s Own.” As Sophie and J
Virginia Woolf 4: A Room Of One's Own
Thank God, my long toil at the women’s lecture is this moment ended. I am back from speaking at Girton, in floods of rain. Starved but valiant young women – that’s my impression.That’s what Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary after delivering the lectures that became “A Room of One’s Own,” arguably the most important feminist manifesto of the twentieth century. Students attending the lectures report
Virginia Woolf 3: Orlando
Virginia Woolf wrote Orlando, a gender-defying historical romance, in 1927, when her intimate friend and lover Vita Sackville-West left London to join her diplomat husband Harold Nicholson in Tehran. Orlando is a love-story set across 300 years of English history, starting in the Elizabethan court and finishing in 1920s England. It features an irresistible protagonist who is both woman and man; a
BONUS: Reading Mrs Dalloway (with Alexandra Schwartz)
"Throw that party. Go for it. It's worth it."In today’s Mrs. Dalloway special episode, Sophie talks to Alex Schwartz, writer, critic and co-host of the New Yorker Magazine’s Critics at Large pod. On “Critics at Large’ she discusses the most urgent cultural matters, ranging from Sesame Street to the Pope to Meaghan and Harry to Ancient Rome. Which is why we knew we needed Alex on the show. It
Virginia Woolf 2: To The Lighthouse
50 is the new 25!“To the Lighthouse” is Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece about summer holidays and the passage of time. It’s perhaps the greatest novel ever written about middle-age, published when Viriginia Woolf herself was middle aged, and recorded by Sophie and Jonty at the height of their middle aged powers. The novel was published in 1927, after “Mrs. Dalloway” and the “Common Reader” in 19
BONUS: Virginia Woolf, the not-so-Common Reader (with Alexandra Harris)
‘Think of a book as a very dangerous and exciting game, which it takes two to play at.’ For Virginia Woolf, reading wasn’t a passive act. It requires guts and ingenuity. At times one is locked in combat with a book, at others one is the ‘accomplice’ of a writer, like an accomplice to crime, aiding an act of daring imagination. Few people read as closely, as critically and joyfully as Virginia
Virginia Woolf 1: Mrs Dalloway
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Not the Secret Life of Books, as we joyfully immerse ourselves in four of Woolf's greatest books to celebrate what is probably the most extraordinary middle-aged flowering of literary talent in history. Virginia Woolf was 43 when she published Mrs. Dalloway, 100 years ago in 1925. She went on to publish To the Lighthouse, Orlando and a Room of One's Own, to name onl
Smells Like Teen Spirit: The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole
Martin Amis’ Money, Thomas Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero… These books are often cited as defining works of the 1980s - serious works of literature that captured the spirit of the age. They are all great books, but spare a thought too for Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13¾. Like The Diary of a Nobody, The Secret Diary of Adrian
The Secret River with Kate Grenville
This special episode on a great modern classic was recorded live at the Sydney Writers' Festival in 2025. Very few novels can genuinely claim to have changed a nation’s consciousness. The Secret River, written by Kate Grenville and published in 2005, is one of those books. It put a spotlight on a side of white settler experience that Australians had been brought up to ignore - the violence, murder
Keeping Up Appearances with the Pooters: The Diary of A Nobody
This episode is a cheat. It's not a real published personal diary, but a satire on published diaries. It’s a fiction, but it’s a fiction that tells us a lot about fact. Published 1892, The Diary of a Nobody is about London clerk, Charles Pooter, his wife Carrie, his son William Lupin, and numerous friends and acquaintances. Most of all, it's about upwardly mobile lower middle class life in London
The Secret Life of Summer Holidays: sunburns, family arguments and holiday cottages in classic literature
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Not if it was the summer holiday that Jonty's family went on to Menorca when a stomach bug ripped through their local village. Or the ill-fated beachside retreat amid a lacerating tropical storm that Sophie took with her mother and sister to mourn her father's death.Classic literature stages endless scenes of summer holidays, some successful and delightful,
BONUS: Move Over Bridgerton: James Boswell's Big Romance
A bonus episode to share the extraordinary detail and richness of the real-time, live-streamed account James Boswell gives us of his first love affair in 1760s London. This may be the closest we can ever come to understanding what passion was like in an age of sexual libertinism and STDs before antibiotics. In our last episode, we talked about Boswell’s long-lost London journal of 1762-63, finally
A Date With Signor Gonorrhea: James Boswell's London Journal 1762
It’s London, 1763 - we're paying a visit to the most fashionable, literary, sexy, filthy, glamorous capital in the world. The 22 year old James Boswell, born and raised on a large country estate outside Edinburgh, has escaped his ambitious and pushy Presbyterian parents and arrived in London. They want him to follow the family footsteps and become a lawyer. He wants a commission in the guards
Plague, fire and hanky-panky in Swinging 1660s London: Samuel Pepys' Diary
Welcome to London in the swinging sixties. One man fights off a towering inferno, navigates a zombie apocalypse, and an invading fleet of evil foreigners, while doing an extraordinary amount of shagging along the way. But we’re not talking about Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. This is the Diary of Samuel Pepys, written in the - flip that 9 upside down - 1660s of Restoration Brita
Breakfast with Jane Austen
Breakfast is the most important meal of the day -- especially for Jane Austen. On and off the page, Austen paid a lot of attention to the breakfast table. In real life, Austen woke before her family, played the piano and got the breakfast ready, before retreating to write for the rest of the morning. And in the novels this meal is no less foundational: it's when we get to see the characters as the
Oscar Wilde 4: Doing rhyme: The Ballad of Reading Gaol
In this episode - the last in our series on Oscar Wilde - we tell the story of the melodramatic, mediagenic, mad, melancholy end of Oscar Wilde's writing life and glittering career as the cleverest man in Britain, after his string of smash hit plays, culminating in "The Importance of Being Earnest." Almost as the curtain went up on his masterpiece he filed a libel suit against the Marquess of Quee
Life and love with MND: Lisa Genova's Every Note Played with Prof Dominic Rowe
Published in 2018, Lisa Genova’s Every Note Played follows the experiences of renowned concert pianist Richard Evans from the moment he is diagnosed with a form of Motor Neurone Disease, or MND, to his death less than two years later. It is a confronting, blow-by-blow account of the physical deterioration caused by MND, but also a testament to humanity’s capacity for empathy, love and redemption.&
Oscar Wilde 3: "A Handbag?!" The Importance of Being Earnest
The Importance of Being Earnest, first performed in 1895 at the sumptuous St James' Theatre in London, was Wilde’s last, and without question his greatest piece of dramatic writing. The handbag, the cucumber sandwiches, the Bunburying and the first class ticket to Worthing all come together to create a timeless classic that has been rarely out of performance since its debut.It was a smash-hit from
Happier with Henry Wotton: Gretchen Rubin on Aphorisms and the Importance of Being Oscar Wilde
Gretchen Rubin is one of America’s best known and best-loved writers on how to be happy. She published her evergreen classic The Happiness Project in 2009, and it was an instant hit. She’s followed it with many more books on the habits of happiness, and she’s also co-host of a hit podcast Happier, which she hosts with her sister, the writer Elizabeth Craft. Today we’re talking about Gretchen’
Oscar Wilde 2: If Looks Could Kill: The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Picture of Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde’s only novel, and it caused a sensation. It was used as evidence in Wilde’s trial for the crime of “gross indecency” in 1895. The conceit of the story is famous – a portrait grows old and corrupt while its human subject remains eternally youthful. But who knows what really happens in this famous modern myth?Sophie and Jonty talk about the influence of Shak
Classic Books vs Trump: Jill Lepore on reading her way through the first 100 days
Jill Lepore is one of America’s most renowned intellectuals. She’s Professor not only of American History, but also of Law at Harvard University; she's a staff writer at the New Yorker, and still finds time to write some of the most renowned history books of the 21st Century, including the magisterial and monumental These Truths: A History of the United States, the brilliant Secret History of Wond
Oscar Wilde 1: The Happy Prince and Other Stories
Few writers have blurred the boundaries between life and art quite so spectacularly as Oscar Wilde. In his writing, he challenged the moral standards of the time, advocated for Irish Nationalism and demanded tolerance of homosexuality. He wrote about decadence and the corruption of youth before going out in a fireball of scandal of his own making, his reputation shattered in the infamous trial tha
BONUS: More 'Rivals': Actor Katherine Parkinson on the joy of Jilly Cooper and playing Lizzie Vereker in the television adaptation
Hot on the heels of our Rivals episode, Sophie and Jonty are joined by the actor and writer Katherine Parkinson - one of the stars of the recent adaptation for television. Katherine talks about playing Lizzie Vereker, wife of the ghastly James Vereker, and the satisfaction she finds in her characters's affair with Freddie Jones; why Jilly Cooper is the Jane Austen of the modern age; and why champa
Bollinger, Board Battles and Bonking Galore: Jilly Cooper's Rivals
Jilly Cooper’s Rivals (1988) is the ultimate bonkbuster - a story of professional rivalry in the Cotswold’s fast-set with lashings of sex thrown in. It follows a wide cast of characters as they jostle for power, conduct affairs with one another’s spouses, eat terrible 1980s food and listen endlessly to Chris de Burgh’s Lady in Red. Rivals was marketed as an airport book back in the day, but b
