Secret Life of Books

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, Ro...

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 Odys...

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 statesm...

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 w...

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 cou...

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 - i...

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...

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...

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...

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. Soph...

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...

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 d...

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 thr...

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 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 beca...

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...

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 Schoo...

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 t...

'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 lat...

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...

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’ tha...

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...

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 tim...

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...

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 talen...

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 ta...