Podcasts · Arts · Education

Secret Life of Books

Sophie Gee and Jonty Claypole

163 episodes

Every book has two stories: the one it tells, and the one it hides. The Secret Life of Books is a fascinating, addictive, often shocking, occasionally hilarious weekly podcast starring Sophie Gee, an English professor at Princeton University, and Jonty Claypole, formerly director of arts at the BBC. Every week these virtuoso critics and close friends 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 above all the secret, mysterious meanings of books we thought we knew. -- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org -- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio: https://patreon.com/SecretLifeofBooks528?utm_medium=unknown&utm_source=join_link&utm_campaign=creatorshare_creator&utm_content=copyLink insta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/ youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shorts

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Episodes page 1 of 4

  1. Classic Australia 2: The Harp in the South by Ruth Park

    · 1 h 07 min · Episode 185

    Ruth Park’s debut novel, The Harp in the South, was first serialized in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1947, provoking angry letters from outraged readers. The book was destined to become an Australian classic. The story…

  2. From Pemberly With Love. SLOB picks the next James Bond.

    · 11 min · Episode 183

    In breaking, literary-adjacent news, Hollywood is about to do the final screen tests to choose the next James Bond. They’ve narrowed it down to just four actors, according to today’s Guardian. But what’s a tough…

  3. Classic Australia 1: My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin

    · 1 h 11 min · Episode 182

    In 1901, six self-governing British colonies in the Southern Hemisphere came together to form a single nation - Australia. In that same year, a 21-year-old woman from rural New South Wales published a book which gave…

  4. SLoB & SLoBability: Diana Reid on adapting Austen's masterpiece for the screen

    · 45 min · Episode 181

    Diana Reid is the hottest young screen adaptation-writer of the hour, and she wrote the screenplay for the delightful new Sense and Sensibility film with Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esme Creed-Miles. Today she's joining us…

  5. Small-talk emergency kit: who the heck is Anne Carson?

    · 21 min · Episode 180

    If you're wondering who this Anne Carson person is who just won the Nobel Prize, then SLoB is here to help. In this punchy 20-minute primer, we give you all the vital statistics and some choice extracts from Carson's…

  6. Factory settings: Elizabeth Gaskell's North & South

    · 1 h 25 min · Episode 179

    Elizabeth Gaskell might be the most underrated novelist of the 19th century. North and South was first published by Charles Dickens in Household Words from 1854-55. But Dickens and Gaskell came to blows over his…

  7. Gothic horror in the age of AI: Alma Katsu on her new novel Incarnate

    · 31 min · Episode 178

    What do you get when you cross an NSA and CIA analyst with a bestselling horror writer? You get Alma Katsu, who talks to Sophie and Jonty about publishing her new novel Incarnate at the exact moment when the threats…

  8. Trashing Up Troy: Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida

    · 1 h 13 min · Episode 177

    Last month we left listeners with the tantalizing question: what happened next in literary history after Chaucer wrote Troilus and Criseyde? This was a serious cliffhanger, and it’s unforgivable that instead of…

  9. Secret Life of Planes

    · 35 min · Episode 175

    Every aircraft is different. That's why we're asking you to listen to the following romp through some of our favorite flight-scenes in literature. Recorded from Heathrow Terminal 3, and then in the air, shortly after…

  10. Secret Life of the River Thames

    · 1 h 08 min · Episode 174

    Sophie and Jonty, coming to you live from London, on the front lines of classic literature. They’re sitting on some steps leading down to the River Thames, right next to the Globe Theatre, on Southbank. True, they stop…

  11. Secret Life of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

    · 31 min · Episode 173

    SLOB goes off-script! While in London a couple of weeks ago, Sophie and Jonty got so excited in the Pre-Raphaelite room of Tate Britain that they whipped out their recording equipment and dashed off an impromptu…

  12. Secret Life of the British Museum

    · 1 h 00 min · Episode 172

    Viriginia Woolf hated it and Karl Marx loved it. Woolf starts her iconic A Room of One’s Own by skewering it as a monument to British patriarchy and toxic masculinity. The inevitable sequel to lunching and dining at…

  13. Secret Life of Reading (with Maggie O'Farrell and Ben Alderson-Day)

    · 54 min · Episode 170

    This episode was recorded at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, with literary superstar Maggie O'Farrell and one of Britain's leading psychologists, Ben Alderson-Day. On the Secret Life of Books, we talk about…

  14. Secret Life of Edinburgh

    · 59 min · Episode 169

    SLOB is in Edinburgh for the International Book Festival. Join us on a walking tour of literary Edinburgh. From Mary Queen of Scots and James VI of Scotland, obsessed with witch hunts and an early anti-tobacco…

  15. Secret Life of Trains 2 (Choo choo!)

    · 37 min · Episode 168

    This week SLOB went full steam ahead from London to Edinburgh, to appear live at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. We love classic books, and we love trains, so what better way to while away the 6 hour…

  16. Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde

    · 1 h 24 min · Episode 166

    We’re aware that Chaucer’s epic poem Troilus and Criseyde written in the 1380s might be a tough sell to even the most devoted SLoB listener, but bear with us. Troilus and Criseyde is not a novel, but it bears a lot of…

  17. Charlotte Higgins on Ukrainian Lessons: Art in a Time of War

    · 51 min · Episode 165

    Charlotte Higgins talks to Jonty about her new book, Ukrainian Lessons, which recounts her experiences the last four years reporting on the cultural life of a nation at war. Culture is never far from the front-line in…

  18. James Joyce 3: Ulysses

    · 1 h 09 min · Episode 164

    Ulysses is a vast novel - over a quarter of a million words. Yet it follows the action of less than 24 hours. To be fair, Joyce packs a lot into that 24 hours. Although our old friend Stephen Daedalus and Leopold Bloom…

  19. Greek Lessons by Han Kang

    · 1 h 09 min · Episode 164

    This week we take a – somewhat unplanned – detour from our James Joyce sequence, which we put on pause while we finished reading the book! We're taking the chance to include in our series on modern Odysseys an episode…

  20. James Joyce 2: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

    · 59 min · Episode 163

    One evening in 1898, the 16-year-old James Joyce lost his virginity with a sex worker on a canal bank in Dublin. The event would become the main event in his autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young…

  21. Emily Wilson, the Odyssey and Why Epics Matter

    · 34 min · Episode 162

    We’ve been saving this one up for a special occasion – a live conversation with Professor Emily Wilson, the celebrated translator of Homer’s Odyssey and the version on which Christopher Nolan’s film is said to be…

  22. A Podcast of One's Own x SLOB: Special Collaboration

    · 54 min · Episode 160

    For this extra special A Podcast of One’s Own × The Secret Life of Books crossover, former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Sophie Gee sit down to celebrate their shared love of books and reading. Julia and…

  23. James Joyce 1: Dubliners

    · 1 h 20 min · Episode 159

    Next in our overview of Odysseys, we embark on an epic journey of our own toward the endless tome masterpiece James Joyce’s Ulysses. No reader comes to Joyce without preconceptions. Was he the greatest literary genius…

  24. The Odyssey 4: Christopher Nolan's Odyssey review

    · 59 min · Episode 158

    We've been limbering up for 3 weeks now, readying ourselves to take on Christopher Nolan's Odyssey, the cinematic event of the year (if you don't count Wuthering Heights or the Devil Wears Prada 2). In this episode,…

  25. The Odyssey 3: Tennyson's Ulysses

    · 1 h 21 min · Episode 156

    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…

  26. The Odyssey 2: How the Odyssey conquered the world

    · 1 h 07 min · Episode 155

    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…

  27. The Odyssey 1: Mary Beard on Homer’s masterpiece

    · 57 min · Episode 154

    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…

  28. The Declaration of Independence at 250

    · 1 h 16 min · Episode 152

    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…

  29. TS Eliot 2: The Waste Land

    · 1 h 21 min · Episode 151

    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…

  30. TS Eliot 1: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

    · 1 h 12 min · Episode 148

    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,…

  31. Bleak House by Charles Dickens - SLoB Book Club returns! (feat. Bret Walker SC)

    · 1 h 17 min · Episode 147

    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…

  32. Sucking the Forbidden Fruit: Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market

    · 1 h 16 min · Episode 146

    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…

  33. Wings and Things: John Keats' Ode to a Nightingale

    · 1 h 14 min · Episode 145

    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…

  34. Paths of Glory: Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

    · 1 h 17 min · Episode 144

    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…

  35. Literary Pilgrimage in New York: From the Mixes Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

    · 33 min · Episode 143

    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…

  36. Canterbury Tales (General Prologue) by Geoffrey Chaucer

    · 1 h 22 min · Episode 142

    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…

  37. The Other Bennet Sister with author Janice Hadlow

    · 54 min · Episode 141

    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…

  38. Back to School 4: Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld

    · 1 h 12 min · Episode 140

    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…

  39. Back to School 3: A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines

    · 1 h 24 min · Episode 139

    Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slob Or join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.In…

  40. Back to School 2: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

    · 1 h 06 min · Episode 138

    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…

  41. Back to School 1: Tom Brown's School Days

    · 1 h 09 min · Episode 136

    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…

  42. The Secret Life of (Literary) Honeymoons

    · 1 h 08 min · Episode 135

    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…

  43. Beowulf: Inside the Anglo-Saxon mind

    · 1 h 21 min · Episode 133

    '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…

  44. "On Morrison": a conversation with Namwali Serpell

    · 40 min · Episode 132

    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…

  45. Toni Morrison 3: Beloved

    · 1 h 13 min · Episode 131

    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…

  46. SLoB Goes to the Oscars: Frankenstein vs Hamnet

    · 49 min · Episode 129

    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…

  47. Saved from Fire: the Toni Morrison Archives

    · 37 min · Episode 128

    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…

  48. Toni Morrison 2: Song of Solomon

    · 1 h 02 min · Episode 127

    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…

  49. The Other Bronte Girl: Anne Bronte's Tenant of Wildfell Hall

    · 1 h 07 min · Episode 125

    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…

  50. Jane Austen's Birthday: why everyone wants to party with Jane

    · 30 min · Episode 124

    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…

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