Secret Life of Books
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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 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.&...
Episodis Recents
107 episodis
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...
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,...
BONUS: Grantchester's James Runcie on the Golden Age of Crime
James Runcie is author of the acclaimed Grantchester Mysteries - the focus of six books and a hugely successful ITV television series - following vica...
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, mor...
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...
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 alre...
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!
...
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...
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...
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 prestigiou...
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. N...
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 Fam...
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...
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 co...
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 America...
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 o...
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...
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 h...
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 pub...
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...
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...
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, som...
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 Tauru...
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 m...
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. Tod...
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 w...
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...
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-hos...
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 n...
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...
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...
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 th...
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...
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...
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 thei...
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...
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...
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 foreign...
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 ta...
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 writ...