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
118 episodis
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...
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 schola...
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 generati...
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...
Jane Austen's Birthday: 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...
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 — t...
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...
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...
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 w...
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 (19...
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...
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...