Secret Life of Books

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 1925. It was an instant hit, sold twice as much as Mrs. Dalloway before publication and was immediately declared Woolf’s masterpiece, admitted by Woolf’s husband Leonard. Woolf herself wasn’t sure about some bits of it, but knew she’d nailed the dinner party scene at the novel’s centre, where the wonderful Mrs. Ramsay serves her guests a boeuf en daube for 14. Join Sophie and Jonty as they continue the story of Virginia Woolf’s extraordinary life and times, told through the details of how she came to write her greatest books. This week we trace her childhood, her summer holidays in Cornwall, her extraordinary, famous, demanding parents, and the beginnings of Woolf’s long struggle with mental illness. And of course we take plenty of detours into holiday cooking and … you guessed it, particle physics.-- 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 and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

‘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 Woolf. For her, books were real relationships – and she famously dedicated Orlando to some of her favourite historical writers as well as her friends. To talk about Woolf as a reader, Jonty is joined by author and scholar Alexandra Harris. Alexandra is author of the acclaimed Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper, Weatherland, The Rising Down and a study of Virginia Woolf. She is currently writing a book all about Virginia Woolf’s life as a reader. Together, Alexandra and Jonty talk about Virginia Woolf’s unique philosophy of reading and discuss some of her favourite books.Further reading:Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (Thames & Hudson, 2023) by Alexandra HarrisVirginia Woolf (Thames & Hudson, 2024) by Alexandra HarrisThe Rising Down (Faber & Faber, 2024) by Alexandra HarrisWeatherland: Writers and Artists Under English Skies (Thames & Hudson, 2015)-- 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 and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 only a few of her extraordinary achievements.To celebrate Mrs. Dalloway's centenary, Virginia Woolf's middle-aged burst of creative brilliance, and to tell the story of the other members of the Bloomsbury circle around her, we take a deep dive into Woolf and her work. Virginia Stephen was born in Victorian England to a famously literary and artistic family: both parents were fixtures in high end London intellectual society. But her childhood was turbulent as much it was illuminated by brilliance all around her. The young Virginia Stephen and her sister Vanessa were sexually and emotionally abused as children and young teenagers, and these early experiences contributed to Woolf's battle with mental illness, probably bipolar disorder. But her life was also filled with joy, including the joy of her marriage to Leonard Woolf and her love affair with Vita Sackville-West.One of many wonderful things about Woolf is that although she died relatively young she left a huge amount of writing behind her. 9 novels, 25 years of diaries, letters, lectures, essays and journalism. Join us for an extraordinary 20thC story of literary glamor and dazzling success, alongside terrible grief, suffering and trauma. We’ll meet many of the biggest names in Modernism, we’ll encounter some of the century’s most horrifying events, and one of fiction's greatest parties.-- 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 and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Mole is a fictional work, following just over a year in the life of a teenage boy in the city of Leicester in the Midlands of England. Adrian falls in love with a girl at school called Pandora, embarks on a career as a self-proclaimed ‘intellectual’, witnesses his parents’ affairs, separation and eventual reunion, and spends a lot of time examining his spots and measuring the size of his 'thing'. All this happens against the backdrop of Margaret Thatcher’s government, the marriage of Prince Charles and Diana, and the Falklands War. The author Sue Townsend was a comic writer, but she uses her comedy - as all the best satirists do - to explore difficult themes. In her case: poverty, domestic abuse and the disintegration of the Welfare State. This is the last in SLoB's series on male diarists through the centuries (and, yes, there will be a follow-up series soon looking at female diarists). The significance of each diary is that it creates space for a previously unheard voice in British culture (Pepys and the Middle Classes, Boswell and Scottish youth, The Diary of a Nobody and the lower-middle-classes). Adrian Mole's voice is that of an impoverished teenage boy far from the capital. Unlike - say - Oliver Twist - he is not a passive victim, but possesses immense agency. He may not be the first of his type, but he is probably the first to be a best-seller. The Secret Diary sold 2 million copies in its first three years - and, as of date, around 20 million in total. In this episode, Sophie and Jonty discuss how and why this deceptively throwaway book took a nation by storm, why it deserves greater prominence as a serious work of literature, and they even reveal the exact length of Adrian’s ‘thing’ as measured (repeatedly) by himself.Texts mentioned...Mr Bevan's Dream: Why Britain Needs Its Welfare State (1989) by Sue TownsendThe Female Eunuch (1970) by Germaine GreerThe Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979) by Douglas AdamsWuthering Heights (1847) by Emily BronteJust William (1922) by Richmal CromptonSons and Lovers (1913) by DH LawrenceRivals (1988) by Jilly CooperTV: Friday Night, Saturday Morning (1979). BBC2. Debate between Malcolm Muggeridge and Monty Python-- 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 and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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, murders and genocide. By questioning her ancestors, Kate Grenville encouraged thousands of Australians with British ancestry to do likewise. Many of us have done so as a consequence of this book, wondering if those heroic pioneers we heard about at a grandparent’s knee were really quite as heroic as all that.Kate Grenville, The Secret River, The Leiutenant, Sarah Thornhill.Kate Grenville, Searching for the Secret River, Unsettled. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 at around the time of Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker and Robert Louis Stevenson. But the Grossmiths showed a side of life and a kind of comedy those other writers wouldn't touch. That's what made Diary of a Nobody a huge bestseller.The Grossmith brothers were cultural barometers of their day. George Grossmith was the most famous character actor in Gilbert and Sullivan's operettas, and a stand-up comic, sketch writer, performer and artist. He wrote hit 18 comic opera, 600 songs, and endless short sketches. Weedon Grossmith (where is that name now?) was also a successful artist, writer, performer and actor.In this episode we'll see a side of Victorian London we haven't delved into until now. Sophie and Jonty feel their oats as upwardly mobile creatives, or Upper Middle Bogans as we're called in Australia. And if anyone listening thinks that SLOB has turned SNOB, that's because The Diary of a Nobody was an unprecedentedly playful and loving look at the domestic anxieties, commuter travel, office politics and food and drink of a highly specific slice of class society in Victorian Britain.This episode reveals what isn’t being talked about in the great books of the period. Sophie and Jonty ask why the Grossmith Brothers used the diary form to write their satire, and how this book in the inheritor of Samuel Pepys and James Boswell's voices. We'll learn how this diary shows the faultlines, tensions and unresolved issues about Victorian masculinity, making Diary of a Nobody a mini masterpiece.Books mentioned in this episode:George and Weedon Grossmith, Diary of a Nobody.Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest; The Picture of Dorian GrayEvelyn Waugh, Decline and FallHG Wells, The History of Mr. Polly, Love and Mr. LewishamGeorge Gissing, New Grub StreetBill Watterman, Calvin and HobbesJim Davis, GarfieldJohn Gay, The Beggar’s OperaGeorge Orwell, Keep the Aspisistra FlyingHerman Melville, Bartlby the ScrivenerWilkie Collins, The MoonstoneE.M. Forster, Howards EndHanif Kureshi, The Buddha of SuburbiaVirginia Woolf, “Mrs. Bennet and Mr. Brown” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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, others, erm, less so. In this joyful episode to celebrate the northern hemisphere summer, Sophie and Jonty travel from the idyllic to the catastrophic by way of a varied and surprising collections of classics taken from many time periods. As they journey through summer suns, winds and rains, they begin to realize just how many writers have used hot weather and family holidays to depict the rich complexities of the human heart and the transformations their characters must undergo in the course of literary narrative. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 published in 1951. We talked briefly about Boswell’s fling with an actor called Louisa. In this bonus episode, we want to do full justice to that story because it is an astonishing document. We are all familiar with the way that story-tellers - from Jane Austen to Bridgerton - depict 18th century seduction scenes, but Boswell gives us the real thing, transcribing dialogue as and when it happened. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 - which means that he wants to loaf around London in peacetime wearing a smart uniform and getting paid. But more than that, he wants to make a splash – to leave his mark among the great writers and artists of his day. Boswell will go on to write the "Life of Samuel Johnson," maybe the greatest biography ever written, and the founding text in modern biography. But in 1762 he’s having trouble getting a start on his career. When this journal was discovered hidden away in a house in Aberdeen in the 20th century, the full extent of Boswell’s literary genius was finally understood. The "London Journal" was published to instant notoriety and celebrity, because of Boswell’s tell-all sexual adventures and total frankness about his efforts to make a mark on literature, and his own life.We see Boswell in company with the most celebrated artists and writers of the day, and we hear about his adventures with his most treasured possession – a reuseable eighteenth-century condom, fabricated from sheeps' intestines. Content warning: this episode includes scenes of sexual violence. Books referred to in this episode:James Boswell, London JournalJames Boswell, Life of Samuel JohnsonJames Boswell and Samuel Johnson, Journal of a Tour to the HebridesSamuel Johnson, Johnson’s DictionarySamuel Johnson, RasselasSamuel Johnson, Lives of the PoetsLaurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram ShandyDavid Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human UnderstandingJohn Hunter, A Treatise of Venereal DiseaseAdam Smith, The Wealth of NationsJoseph Addison and Richard Steele, the Tatler and The Spectator-- 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 and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Britain.  Pepys’ contribution to history, literature and the modern soul is second to none, but it was his reforms to the navy that made him a big cheese in his day. And, speaking of cheese, this is a man who loves his parmesan - as we’ll be discovering. Without very little precedence to draw upon, Pepys - a nobody at the time - sat down on 1 January 1660 and spilled his soul and most intimate secrets onto the page in a way nobody had done before. He kept it up for the next ten years, giving us a front row seat at the frivolous court of King Charles II, the Great Fire of London, the horrific plague of 1665, and the bosoms of many unfortunate women who willingly or otherwise faced his advances. Join us for the the first episode in a series about personal diaries from the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s and 1900s. Books mentioned in this episode:Samuel Pepys, Diary of Samuel PepysJohn Evelyn, The Diary of John EvelynJoseph Addison and Richard Steele, the SpectatorClaire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled SelfSophie Gee, Making Waste: Leftovers and the Literary Imagination -- 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 and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 they really are, sometimes up and about for hours before downing a boiled egg and a piece of toast, barely managing to consume a thin piece of bread and butter, or shoveling up pork, eggs and coffee after a morning's ride. Breakfast is the least formal meal of the day, so we see lots of interactions that can't happen at dinner, lunch or supper, when servants are present. At all times, Austen pays meticulous attention to what gets eaten, how, and why, and of course what is revealed about all of her characters when they sit down to table.Join us for a joyful romp through Austen's meals, in a studio recording of a session Sophie and Jonty presented at the Sorrento Writers Festival in April 2025, with the world-renowned Austen scholar Clara Tuite, whose "Thirty Great Myths About Jane Austen", co-authored with Sophie's Princeton colleague Claudia Johnson, is a must-read for any Janeite. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Queensberry, the father of Alfred Douglass, Wilde's lover. It was the beginning of a series of legal, emotional and financial disasters for Oscar Wilde, and led to the last of his great works: The Ballad of Reading Gaol. In previous episodes we looked at Wilde's break-out collection of fairy tales (the Happy Prince), a novel (Dorian Gray) and his greatest play. With The Ballad of Reading Gaol Wilde's career culminated, and ended, with a long poem. It tells the story of Charles Thomas Wooldridge, a trooper in the Royal Horse Guards, who murdered his girlfriend and was executed at Reading Gaol, where Wilde was also incarcerated, in July 1896. With "Reading Goal," Wilde's most distinctive literary device, the paradox, stops being a force of subversive delight, and becomes a grim, philosophical reflection on the impossibility of happiness. The poem was published in 1898 under the name C33, which was Wilde’s prison name. It seemed to herald a new beginning for Wilde - the work of a reflective, penitent and compassionate artist - but it was actually his swan song. He was unable to write anything else before his death at the age of 46 in 1900.Works referred to in this episode:Oscar Wilde, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” (1898) De profundis (pub. 1905)John Betjeman, The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel (1937)John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678)Anon. Newgate Calendar, or The Malefactors' Bloody Register, (1774)Susan Fletcher, Twelve Months in an English Prison, (1883)Marcus Clark, For the Term of His Natural Life, (1872)Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798)William Wordsworth, the “Lucy” poems (1798-1801)Ballads by Keats, Byron and the Border poets (18C)John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695)John Milton, De doctrina christiana (written 17C, pub 1825) and the Divorce Tracts (1643-45)William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, Sexual Inversion (1896)Edward Carpenter, “Civilization, Its Cause and Cure” and other essays (1889)D.H. Lawrence Lady Chatterley’s Lover, (1828)E.M. Forster Maurice, (written 1913-14, pub. 1972)Charlotte Wilson and Peter Kropotkin, Freedom Magazine (founded 1886)-- 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 and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. In this special episode, recorded in support of MotorOn (which raises funding for MND research), Jonty talks to Professor Dominic Rowe - director of the Macquarie University Centre for MND and one of the world’s leading experts in MND. When Every Note Played begins, Richard is recently divorced from his wife Karina, but neither have been able to move on from their anger and endless emotional ruminating. But when Richard is diagnosed, Karina becomes his primary carer. Over the last months of his life, they learn to forgive one another and move on - one towards death, the other towards creative rebirth. Every Note Played is the fifth novel by Lisa Genova, who made her debut with the bestselling Still Alice in 2007. Still Alice was adapted into a film, with Julianne Moore giving an Oscar winning performance in the title role as the 50 year old Alice who develops onset dementia. Richard Glatzer directed the film while suffering from advanced MND - and he died a few months after release. Inspired by Glatzer, and their friendship, Genova wrote Every Note Played.Content warning: this episode is a frank conversation about a subject some may find disturbing.For more information about MND, please go to: Macquarie Centre for MND Research - www.mndnsw.org.au - the site has links to info lines and information packs If you are interested in donating to MotorOn and supporting the work of the Macqueries Centre for MND Research, please go to www.motoron.org Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 the moment it opened, but even as the lights went up, Wilde was grabbing the spotlight in the press and the courts with his libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of Wilde's young gay lover Bosie.None of this is apparent on first viewing "Earnest," which seemingly refuses to be serious. It's a farce and a romance and a fairy tale -- but it's also a radical confession of homosexual attraction and a bitter satire on Victorian morality and domestic politics. It’s also a parody of Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta Patience which was itself a parody of Oscar Wilde and the aesthetic movement in England.Content warning to listeners: reading this play – and possibly just listening to this episode - will cause you to irritate your family members by attempting aphoristic remarks and epigrammatic witticisms.Books and writers mentioned in this episode:Oscar Wilde: A LIfe (2021) by Matthew SturgisSodomy on the Thames: Sex, Love and Scandal in Wilde Times (2012) by Morris B KaplanOscar Wilde, Vera, or, The Nihilists; Salome; The Importance of Being Earnest; Lady Windermere's Fan; A Woman of No Importance; The Ideal Husband.Oscar Wilde, "The Portrait of Mr. W.H."; "The Decay of Lying"; "The Soul of Man Under Socialism"; "The Critic as Artist"Bram Stoker, DraculaShakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream; Much Ado About NothingRichard Brinsley Sheridan, The School for Scandal; The RivalsOliver Goldsmith, She Stoops to ConquerHenry Arthur Jones, The Silver King; Saints and SinnersArthur Wing Pinero, The Second Mrs. TanquerayCharles Dickens, George Eliot, Emile ZolaHenrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler; The Doll's HouseGeorge Bernard Shaw, The Philanderer, Mrs. Warren's Profession, Pygmalion Leo Tolstoy, Anna KareninaMary Shelley, Frankenstein-- 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 and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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’s take on Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde’s only novel, which is packed with sometimes brilliant and sometimes merely glib aphorisms and witticisms. We talk about why pithy sayings are so appealing, whether they are ever really true, and why Wilde was so obsessed with this kind of writing. A companion episode to episode 63 on the book itself. Mentioned on this episode: Gretchen Rubin: The Happiness Project, Life in Five Senses, Happier and Home and Secrets of Adulthood.Gretchen Rubin and Elizabeth Craft: Happier the podcast.Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray.-- 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 and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Jonty throws around some exciting legal phrases like the Criminal Law Amendment Act. There’s plenty of discussion of Wilde’s personal obsession with home interiors, as well as a debate about why Wilde is so indebted to Dickens when he’s always going on about his contempt for matters of morality. Find out how a novel that is quintessentially about London is also about Wilde’s Irish identity, and what kind of wallpaper Oscar Wilde had in his student digs at Oxford. As the arch-aphorist and aesthetic rogue Henry Wotton would say, this podcast episode “has all the surprise of candour,” so find out what really happens in this legendary modern myth. Books referenced or mentioned in this episode:Oscar Wilde: A LIfe (2021) by Matthew SturgisSodomy on the Thames: Sex, Love and Scandal in Wilde Times (2012) by Morris B KaplanOscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888)Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” and “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” (1889)Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (1838)Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864); Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870); Around the World in Eighty Days (1872)Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)H.G. Wells The Time Machine (1895) War of the Worlds (1898)-- 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 and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Wonder Woman and Sophie’s personal favourite, a history of King Phillip’s War and the origins of American identity.For the first 100 days of the new US presidency, Jill Lepore turned to the classics-- the Penguin Little Black Classics to be exact. In these miniature volumes of great writing, Jill found the imaginative intelligence, resilience and sense of ordinary pleasures she needed to abide with what's going on across America -- and at Harvard specifically -- as a result of Trump's turbulent regime. Listen and learn how the classics reconnect us with deep truths that we might "hold to be self-evident," but which have so often been under threat across human history.Books mentioned in this episode and published in Penguin Little Black Classics:The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio (~1350)"As Kingfishers Catch Fire," Gerard Manley Hopkins (1877)Anon. The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue (late 13C)Wailing Ghosts, Pu Songling (c.1640)"A Modest Proposal," Jonathan Swift (1727)Tang Dynasty Poets (c8C)"On the Beach at Night Alone," Walt Whitman (1856)A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees, Kenko (13C)"The Eve of St Agnes," John Keats (1819)"Travels in the Land of Serpents and Pearls," Marco Polo (c1300)"Caligula," Suetonius (121 CE)"Olalla," Robert Louis Stevenson (1885)The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848)"Trimalchio's Feast", Petronius (c.60 CE)Inferno, Dante (14C)"The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale," Geoffrey Chaucer (c1390)Essais, Michel de Montaigne (1580)"The Beautifull Cassandra," Jane Austen (1788)Homer, The Iliad and The Odyssey"The Maldive Shark," Herman Melville (1888)Socrates’ Defence, Plato (399 BCE)"Goblin Market," Christina Rossetti (1862)-- 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 and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 that followed. So, was Oscar Wilde the great genius of his day or just a rather talented man with a knack for publicity? Was he a martyr in the history of gay activism, or just a self-absorbed pain in the arse? These are just some of the questions Sophie and Jonty are asking in the first of a four part series on Oscar Wilde. In this first episode, they look at his early years and how cultural and political movements of the time shaped his first great work - the seemingly timeless fairy-tales of The Happy Prince and Other Stories. Into these stories, Wilde condensed years of scholarship, literary criticism and the development of a personal aesthetic and philosophy. It is a short book and deceptively simple because these stories - like all the best fairytales - conceal deeper truths about human experience. Most importantly, through them Wilde found his voice as a writer, unleashing the extraordinary creative outpouring of the following ten years. Texts referred to: Oscar: A Life (2018) by Matthew SturgisAlice in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll Children’s and Household Tales (1812) by the Brothers GrimmDoctor Faustus (c.1594) Christopher MarlowePatience (1881) by Gilbert and Sullivan (extract from 1961 recording with John Reed) Study of the Greek Poets (1873) by JA Symonds Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) by Walter PaterSocial Life in Greece (1874) by John Pentland MahaffyDavid Copperfield (1850) by Charles DickensA Christmas Carol (1843) by Charles Dickens Hard Times (1854) by Charles DickensDracula (1897) by Bram Stoker -- 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 and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 champagne is more than an optional extra when it comes to sex on screen.-- 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 and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 beneath the brash cover is a sophisticated story that draws in surprising ways from classic literature to create what is now considered to be a modern classic. Sophie and Jonty why they are so drawn to Rivals, what we can learn about the 1980s from reading it today, and the ways in which it engages with a wide range of literary influences, including Austen, Trollope and Yeats, but also Valley of the Dolls and the works of Jackie Collins and Danielle Steele. BOOKS DISCUSSED/ALLUDED TO: Rivals (1988) by Jilly Cooper Mansfield Park (1814) by Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice (1813) by Jane Austen The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) by WB Yeats A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-1975) by Anthony PowellBarchester Towers (1857) by Anthony Trollope Possession (1990) by AS ByattOscar and Lucinda (1988) by Peter CareyBilgewater (1977) by Jane Gardam Middlemarch (1872) by George EliotCocktail (1988) screenplay by Heywood GouldLady in Red (1986) by Chris de BurghValley of the dolls (1966) by Jacqueline SusannThe Bitch (1979) by Jackie Collins -- 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 and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the oldest surviving works of literature - an epic poem from ancient Mesopotamia, stitched together from fragments going back as far as 2100BCE. It tells the story of Gilgamesh, King of Uruk, his friendship with the wild man Enkidu, and his attempts to come to terms with his own mortality. Although incomplete, the essence of the story - and many passages - are preserved thanks to the work of dedicated Assyriologists past and present. To discuss this extraordinary work, Sophie and Jonty are joined by Robert Macfarlane, author of The Wild Places (2007), The Old Ways (2012), Underland (2019) and now Is A River Alive? (2025). Rob has been obsessed with Gilgamesh for many years - what it has to tell us about humanity and the environment. BOOKS REFERRED TO:The Epic of Gilgamesh (1999) translated by Andrew George Gilgamesh: A New English Version (2004) by Stephen Mitchell Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic (2021) by Sophus HelleWe Have Never Been Modern (1991) by Bruno Latour Camera Lucida (1981) by Roland Barthes Civilization and its Discontents (1930) by Sigmund Freud The Country and the City (1973) by Raymond Williams People of the River (2021) by Grace Karskens Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Emily Dickinson is probably the most famous female poet in the world. And yet – at least according to Dickinson mythology – her work could easily have gone unpublished. She wrote 1800 poems but published only 10 in her lifetime. Instead, she bound them into little bundles of paper, tied with kitchen string. These were found after her death by her sister Lavinia and after many stops and starts the first collection was published in 1890 by her friend and mentor, the critic and abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson. It was an instant hit with 11 editions in less than 2 years.The spontaneity and freshness of the poems appealed to readers, as well as their fragmentary, transient, unfinished quality, as though they were moments of thought or feeling, grabbed out of thin air.She wrote about death and life, ordinary objects, the natural world, light, air, love and god with a kind of improvisational vim that proved timeless.The legend of Dickinson is more flamboyant than the writing, which is precise, miniaturist and modest. In this episode Sophie and Jonty talk about the relationship between Dickinson’s world in Amherst and her world on the scraps and fragments of paper she wrote on; the tensions between her reclusive persona and her prolific and highly professional writing life; her disdaining publication and her making sure that it would happen, and the ambiguities of her most intimate relationships. How has such a quiet and unforthcoming poet destined to become one of the most relatable, personal and confessional voices in the history of world poetry?Books etc referred to in this episode:Martha Ackmann These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily DickinsonCristanne Miller and Karen Sánchez-Eppler Oxford Handbook of Emily DickinsonDiana Fuss The Sense of An InteriorLisa Brooks The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the NortheastCharlotte Bronte, Jane EyreEmily Bronte, “No Coward Soul Am I”Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese and Aurora LeighThomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus and On HeroesRalph Waldo Emerson, EssaysHenry David Thoreau, Walden, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Cape CodIsaac Watts, HymnsTaylor Swift, The Tortured Poets Department.-- 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 and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As Australia heads to the polls, Sophie and Jonty slap their democracy sausages on the bbq and take a tour of the greatest elections and electoral candidates in literary history. Their journey takes them through the full political spectrum - from Ancient Athens to Shakespeare's London, the fictional towns of Middlemarch and Market Snodsbury to the great American plains. Candidates include Richard III, Sir Robert Walpole and a flock of unruly birds, but in the end there can only be one winner. Who will it be? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard III is one of the OG villains of English literary history, the usurper king who killed his brother, nephews (the infamous “Princes in the Tower”) and seduced his brother's wife all in the space of about six months. Richard III is also known as “Crookback,” or the hunchback of Windsor Castle, because of his curvature of the spine, which prompted the great historian and Tudor apologist Thomas More to describe him as “little of stature, ill featured of limbs, crooked-backed,” a condition that made him “malicious, wrathful and perverse.” Shakespeare used Richard’s villainy and disability with unprecedented skill and daring, creating a character whose deformity and appetite for evil became assets and sources of charm.Richard III is Shakespeare’s first masterpiece. He probably wrote it in 1592 or 93, after warming-up with Taming of the Shrew, Henry VI parts 1, 2 and 3, Two Gentlemen of Verona and Titus Andronicus. With the psychological depth of these characters and his analysis of relationships under the strain of political volatility and anxiety, Shakespeare accessed a new kind of writing, influenced by Marlowe’s hit Tamburlaine. In Richard III we see the cruelty and misogynistic violence of Shrew reappear, along with the lust for blood that Shakespeare front loaded in Titus Andronicus. And we see the sit-com like return of the royal family from the Henry VI plays – all of whom would have been familiar to Elizabethan audiences. Richard III is like the season finale of Succession, when we find out what’s going to happen to all the scheming, unpleasant, entitled nepo babies and their underlings.-- 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 and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On 3 December 1926, only a few months after the publication of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (in book form), Agatha Christie mysteriously disappeared, leaving an abandoned car in a ditch. As the days passed, the media went wild with excitement, vast searches involving thousands of volunteers were conducted in the Surrey countryside, and her husband Archie let the side down with unsympathetic speculation about what might have really happened. Eleven days later she was discovered staying incognito in a spa hotel in Harrogate, having suffered a terrible breakdown, involving memory loss and confusion about her identity. After a short recovery, she resumed her career becoming the best-selling novelist of all time. Sophie and Jonty recount the story of what happened during those eleven days. BOOKS/FILMS READ OR REFERRED TO: Agatha Christie (2022) by Lucy Worsley -- 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 and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The three best-selling authors of all time are, in order, God, Shakespeare and Agatha Christie. Exact figures are hard to know, but the gulf between Christie and the second division is big enough to guarantee her place. She has sold over 2 billion books (and just to make that number easier to comprehend, that’s two thousand million). There are a handful of contenders for her greatest book overall, but The Murder of Roger Ackroyd - first serialised exactly 100 years ago in 1925 - is usually amongst them. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd tells the story of murderous happenings in the English country village of Kings Abbot, peaking with the mysterious death of local squire Roger Ackroyd. By happy circumstance, the famous detective Hercule Poirot has recently retired to the village. Already bored stiff by his attempts to grow marrows in his garden, he leaps at the chance of solving a crime, slowly revealing the hidden desires and secrets of his suspects before the grand reveal. Sophie and Jonty turn detective too to work out why this relatively short book with its action never ranging far from a small village has proven so successful and influential. It has been adapted many times for radio, television and film with Charles Laughton, Orson Welles and (of course) David Suchet playing Poirot. Its influence on popular culture is much broader, inspiring everything from the board game Cluedo to films like Knives Out. In this episode, Sophie and Jonty going to reveal the secrets behind Agatha Christie’s unique take on detective fiction, tell the origin story of her most famous creation Hercule Poirot, and show how the publication of the book was an inciting incident for her infamous disappearance a few months afterwards. Their investigations take them surfing with Agatha in Hawaii, into speculations about the origin of the Wagon Wheel biscuit and, of course, some truly dreadful impersonations of Hercule Poirot. SPOILER ALERT! We reveal the identity of the murderer, but only in the final part of the episode and give clear warning before we do. BOOKS/FILMS READ OR REFERRED TO: The Life and Times of Hercule Poirot (199) by Anne Hart Agatha Christie (2022) by Lucy Worsley Who Killed Roger Ackroyd (1998) by Pierre Bayard The Murder of Roger Ackroyd radio play (1939) by Orson Welles  One Thousand And One Nights The Chalk Circle (14th century)Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee (18th century) The Murder in the Rue Morgue (1841) by Edgar Allan Poe Oliver Twist (1838) by Charles DickensBleak House (1853) by Charles DickensThe Woman in White (1860) by Wilkie CollinsThe Moonstone (1868) by Wilkie Collins The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1921) by Agatha ChristieThe Wasteland (1922) by TS EliotUlysses (1922) by James Joyce Cane (1923) by Jean Toomer Mrs Dalloway (1925) by Virginia Woolf The Weary Blues (1926) by Langston Hughes The Sun Also Rises (1926) by Ernest Hemingway Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker Heart of Darkness (1899) by Joseph Conrad -- 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 and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes, wrote the Roman poet Juvenal two thousand years ago. And just in case your Latin isn’t up to scratch, we’ll translate it for you: Who watches the watchmen? That line provided inspiration to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen - arguably the first graphic novel to join the ranks of classic literature.Published as a stand-alone comic in twelve issues between 1986 and 1987, and compiled later that year, Watchmen did for comics what Sergeant Pepper’s did for pop music, legitimising them as a serious artform in the eyes of many. Watchmen is influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Pynchon and Jorge Luis Borges as much as Superman and Batman.It tells the story of a group of morally-dubious, has-been superheroes, who are being picked off one-by-one by a mysterious killer against the backdrop of nuclear threat. These are the ‘watchmen’ of the title, but - as the quote from Juvenal suggests - pity the society that is looked after by these guys. Sure, they fight crime, but they also commit a lot of it - and even they aren’t sure if the world is a better place for their existence.  While the book isn’t short on action, its characters also discuss philosophy, analyse the history of the comic as an art-form and engage in commercial ventures to capitalise on their own story. Some time ago, when TIME Magazine listed the 100 most important books of the past century, Watchmen was on the list, wedged somewhere between Lolita and Things Fall Apart (in this case you really do have the watch the watchmen because one of the people responsible for the list and, in particular, for Watchmen’s inclusion, was Sophie’s husband Lev). To discuss the book, Sophie and Jonty are joined by Andy Miller - writer, performer and one-half of the power duo behind the brilliant Backlisted podcast. In fact, when we asked Andy to come on the show and what book he wanted to do, Watchmen was the first thing he said.  In this episode, Andy, Sophie and Jonty discuss how Watchmen predicted the 21st Century, changed the shape of comics and literature, and why Alan Moore can’t stand the term ‘graphic novel’. BOOKS REFERRED:  Watchmen (1986-7) by Alan MooreProvidence (2015-17) by Alan MooreJerusalem (2016) by Alan MooreMaus: A Survivor’s Tale (1991) by Art Spiegelman The Dark Knight Returns (1986) by Frank Miller American Psycho (1991) by Bret Easton Ellis Paradise Lost (1667) by John Milton Tristram Shandy (1767) by Laurence SterneThe Prisoner (TV series) (1967-8)Revelations In the Wink of An Eye (2024) by Jeffrey Lewis -- 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 and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From Macavity to Samuel Johnson’s Hodge, Buck to Rochester’s Pilot, what is classic literature without its pets? One of the most affecting scenes in The Odyssey, that foundation stone of western literature, occurs when Argos, Odysseus’ aged dog, dies at the moment of reunion with his long lost owner. Not even the knowledge of his afterlife as a shopping catalogue can relieve the pathos of the moment. In this episode, Sophie and Jonty make amends for slaughtering Boxer the carthorse in their episode on Animal Farm with a celebration of their favourite pets in literature. We make the case that the early 18th Century was the Golden Age for Pet Lit, that Dickens was so masterful at characterisation even the animals in his books are unforgettable, that Jane Austen was - on the basis of her books - no animal lover, while the Bronte sisters very much were. Finally, Jonty accidentally uncovers Sophie’s deep, repressed love for Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books. Like a match to gunpowder, just mentioning the books sends Sophie into a long homily to Timmy the dog.  Note: No animals were harmed in the production of this episode. BOOKS DISCUSSED My Dog Tulip (1956) by JR Ackerley Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939) by TS EliotThe Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) by James Boswell  Rape of the Lock (1717) by Alexander Pope Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat (1747) Thomas Gray Jubilate Agno (1759-63) by Christopher Smart The Nun’s Priest Tale (1390s) by Geoffrey ChaucerOliver Twist (1838) by Charles Dickens David Copperfield (1850) by Charles Dickens Gulliver’s Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Bronte  The Odyssey  Sense and Sensibility (1811) by Jane Austen Mansfield Park (1814) by Jane Austen Five Go To Smuggler’s Top (1945) by Enid Blyton  Gilead (2004) by Marilynne Robinson Rivals (1988) by Jilly Cooper The Call of the Wild (1903) by Jack London Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) by Truman Capote-- 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 and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As Shakespeare almost wrote: Orwell That Ends Well. While our six-part series on George Orwell comes to a triumphant end, Orwell’s life - alas - did not. He died too young and deeply pessimistic about the future of the world. In this last episode, Sophie and Jonty look at the bright side of life in Airstrip One, speculate what really lies within Room 101, and - REFORMATION ALERT - take a deep dive into the possible influence of 16th Century theological revolution on Winston Smith’s life (and betrayal). Finally, we step away from 1984 to reflect on this Orwell series as a whole: how do we feel about Orwell now, knowing what we do about his life, his triumphs and failures, and the controversy surrounding his treatment of his wife and women in general? Books referenced, quoted, or mentioned: Orwell: The New Life (2023) by DJ Taylor WIFEDOM (2023) by Anna Funder The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 (2021) by Dorian LynskeyEssays by George Orwell Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Newspeak, Big Brother, the Thought Police, Room 101, doublethink, sex crime, the Ministry of Truth. Few books have generated quite as many outlandish yet unforgettable concepts as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. So much so that Orwell’s name is now an adjective - Orwellian - which, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary means ‘relating to or suggestive of the dystopian reality depicted in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Published in 1949, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a nightmare from start to finish. It follows the demise of Winston Smith - a desk-worker in a totalitarian regime called Airstrip One - as he navigates his way through daily life in a version of London ravaged by nuclear war, makes the great error of falling in love and is finally tortured and brainwashed into a state of pathetic subservience and adoration of the fictional leader of Airstrip One: Big Brother. Part of the enduring impact of Nineteen Eighty-Four is the way Orwell successfully, but regretfully, identified emerging trends in our culture. And although Britain did not become Airstrip One - other countries in the world did, including North Korea and Turkmenistan, arguably did. Reading Orwell’s novel is still one of the best ways of understanding life in such regimes. In this episode, Sophie and Jonty discuss the way that Nineteen Eighty-Four both compels and repels us as readers and chart the long road to the book’s creation at the end of another long road - the track leading to Barnhill house in the Scottish island of Jura, where Orwell spent much of his last years. For anyone concerned this might be too heavy as an episode, we lean into the unacknowledged strain of comedy that runs through the book, as well as the hope implicit in the so-called Appendix Theory (the idea that the book is narrated by somebody after the fall of the regime). Anyone interested in numerology will note that this is episode 49 of Secret Life of Books and that 1949 was the year Nineteen Eighty-Four was published. We did not plan this, but just as fate draws Winston Smith to O’Brien and Room 101, so we are drawn into Orwell’s dystopian vision… Books referenced, quoted, or mentioned: Orwell: The New Life (2023) by DJ Taylor WIFEDOM (2023) by Anna Funder The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 (2021) by Dorian LynskeyEssays by George OrwellGulliver’s Travels (1726) by Jonathan SwiftThe Handmaid’s Tale (1985) by Margaret AtwoodThe Sleeper Awakes (1899) by HG WellsThe Iron Heel (1908) by Jack London We (1921) by Yevgeny ZamyatinAnthem (1938) by Ayn RandLolita (1955) by Vladimir NabokovLord of the Rings (1955) by JRR Tolkien Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

George Orwell is one of the most famous names in classic literature, thanks to his novels Animal Farm and 1984, both dystopian fables of worlds gone mad, ruled over by autocratic pigs and authoritarian governments who monitor their citizens– or barnyard companions – every move.And yet for all his commitment to political and social justice, or at least the calling out of injustice and repression, Orwell’s private relationships were troubled and difficult, particularly his relationship with his wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy.In 2023, the internationally celebrated historian and novelist Anna Funder published Wifedom to instant acclaim. It’s a beautifully crafted biography of Eileen, re-assessment of Orwell, and polemical memoir of Anna’s own life as a writer, mother and wife. The book has had a huge impact on wives and women all over the world and has changed the way we think about Orwell.Anna’s home turf as a writer is the challenge of staying human under repressive regimes. She is the author of the brilliant Stasiland a documentary history of life in East Germany under the Stasi secret police in the aftermath of world war 2, and All That I Am, an historical novel about Nazi Germany and Hitler’s atrocities. Anna joins Sophie and Jonty in the studio to talk about Eileen, Eric Blair, early 20thC British history, and the experience of publishing Wifedom. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Animal Farm is George Orwell’s micro masterpiece, an animal fable that offers a devastating critique of Stalinist Russia and the rise of totalitarianism. Orwell described it to a friend as a “little squib,” but it’s much more than that: a tiny atom bomb that lands a structurally perfect hit on mid-20th century political authoritarianism and communism’s failure to protect the people it purported to serve.Written over the winter 1943/1944, Animal Farm is the closest Orwell came to a piece of collaborative writing, as Orwell and Eileen revised the book together, huddled in bed to stay warm in chronically cold houses.Animal Farm was rejected by 4 publishers (including TS Eliot at Faber & Faber) before it was snapped up by Secker and Warburg and published in 1945 and became an instant hit, hugely popular ever since. As Sophie and Jonty tell the history of the novella, they also retrace the early years of Orwell’s marriage to Eileen O’Shaugnessey when they lived together on a smallholding farm in Wallingford Hertfordhsire, complete with a  farm-shop; Orwell’s flirtation with violent revolution during the years of the Second World War; and, less dramatically, his time as a producer at the BBC. Sophie and Jonty also sing Beasts of England in its entirety (to the tune of Darling Clementine), discuss how to make the perfect cup of tea, and Jonty’s bad experiences at a prestigious London restaurant, and why - in many ways - Animal Farm really is just about the animals. Books referenced, quoted, or mentioned: Orwell: The New Life (2023) by DJ Taylor WIFEDOM (2023) by Anna Funder Orwell’s Roses (2021) by Rebecca SolnitDarkness at Noon (1940) by Arthur KoestlerEssays by George OrwellGulliver’s Travels (1726) by Jonathan SwiftThe Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer Leviathan (1651) by Thomas HobbesThe Social Contract (1762) by Jean-Jacques RousseauThe Communist Manifesto (1848) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Together, Siegfried Sassoon’s The Old Huntsman (1917) and Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918) are among the greatest examples of protest art in British history. Sassoon was a decorated war hero, who took a stand - when few others dared - on the moral emptiness, institutional corruption and brutality of the First World War. Alongside his poetry, Sassoon took the shocking measure of writing an open letter, which was read out in parliament, in which he accused the British government and military of deception, of deliberately prolonging an ‘evil and unjust’ war, and the complacency of the British public for not holding the government to account.As a consequence, he faced a court-martial and certain imprisonment, but his friend - the fellow poet Robert Graves - intervened and persuaded the authorities that Sassoon was mentally ill. Instead, Sassoon was sent to Craiglockhart Hospital, under the care of pioneering psychoanalyst WHR Rivers, where he wrote many of his finest poems, before returning to the frontline for the final months of the war.  In this episode, Sophie and Jonty are joined by historian and Sassoon biography Max Egremont, who explains the extraordinary circumstances that led to Sassoon - an officer so brave that his men nicknamed him Mad Jack - turning against the war and embracing the tiny, fringe movement that was pacifism in the 1910s. We’ll find out about his friendships with fellow poet Wilfred Owen and psychologist WHR Rivers at Craiglockhart Military Hospital, which inspired Pat Barker’s best-selling Regeneration trilogy. Finally, the question is asked - can poetry ever change the world?Siegfried Sassoon: A Biography (2005) by Max Egremont.Regeneration Trilogy by Pat Barker (1991-1995) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

War is boring; revolution is boring; politics is boring. That’s the message of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. But, somehow, Homage to Catalonia itself is NOT boring. Published in 1938, it charts Orwell’s experience on, behind and beyond the front line of the fight against Fascism in the Spanish Civil War. Through the course of his narrative, written in the weeks immediately following his return to England, adrenalin still pumping in his veins, Orwell takes us through the complexity of internecine factionalism in Republican Barcelona, derring-do raids on General Franco’s trenches, his own experience of being shot in the throat by a fascist sniper, and the narrow escape by himself and his wife Eileen when they became political targets of the Soviet Union with a warrant out for their arrest. Homage to Catalonia was a massive flop - think Betamax video, New Coke, or Michael Jackson’s Invincible album - selling less than a thousand copies, but it has become recognised as a masterpiece of reportage. Most importantly, it contains the political awakening and many of the ideas leading directly to Animal Farm and 1984. In these pages, we see Orwell’s horror of totalitarianism, his fear of rats, the betrayal of workers by their supposedly revolutionary leaders, of newspaper censorship rewriting the past with alternative facts. And, in anarchist Barcelona, we even see a glimpse of Airstrip One - a crumbling post-revolutionary city with blue-overall wearing citizens, gradually succumbing to Stalinist mind-control. This is the second episode in our four-part series on George Orwell. The first, following Orwell’s early life was about the impact of the First World War, the moral abyss of the British Empire and the Great Depression on his first book Down and Out in Paris and London. In this, Sophie and Jonty look at the rise of fascism in Europe through Orwell’s front row seat of the Spanish Civil War, taking us up to brink of the Second World War. Content warning: mild bad language Books referenced, quoted, or mentioned: Orwell: The New Life (2023) by DJ Taylor WIFEDOM (2023) by Anna Funder Essays by George OrwellThe Road to Wigan Pier (1937) by George OrwellNineteen Eighty-Four (1949) by George Orwell People of the Abyss (1904) by Jack London Tropic of Cancer (1934) by Henry Miller Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930) by Siegfried SassoonFor Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) by Ernest Hemingway Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Elizabeth Bishop is one of those poets who’s often referred to as a writer’s writer, but this doesn’t mean her poems are hard to read. On the contrary: as one of the most loved and admired twentieth-century poets, Bishop has the rare ability to do high-low. She’s enjoyable and accessible and also intensely artful and complex, not to mention very funny. In this special episode, Sophie and Jonty chat to American writer and critic Rachel Cohen about her decades-long admiration for Bishop and deep appreciation for her art.Bishop was born in New England and spent a significant amount of her childhood in Nova Scotia, Canada. Her writing is infused with the austerity and beauty of Northeast America. But Bishop has another side too, a flamboyance and lushness of texture that came from living in Key West Florida and Brazil. She struggled with alcoholism and depression and had intense lifelong friendships with several of the most important writers of her generation, including the great poets Robert Lowell and Marianne Moore.We talk about the paradoxes and contradictions of Bishop and her last published collection, Geography III, with the brilliant Rachel Cohen, whose books, essays and occasional observations are, like Bishop’s poems, beautiful, meticulous, and expansive all at once. Rachel has written about Bishop in her fabulous book A Chance Meeting.Further Reading:Elizabeth Bishop, Geography IIIRachel Cohen, A Chance Meeting-- 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 and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the winter of 1927, George Orwell dropped his aitches, pulled on his distressed tailored trousers, and took the first of many trips to the underbelly of London society. Over the following years, he spent long stints amongst the homeless and starving people of both Paris and London. He collected these experiences into his first book Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), conveniently leaving out the weekends and kitchen sups with mater and pater.Orwell’s intention was partly to draw attention to the appalling social inequality of France and England after the First World War, but also simply to allow his imagination to wallow in scenes of surreal vividness and black humour. In this - the first in a four-part series about Orwell’s life, work and times - Sophie and Jonty look at the circumstances that lead to his first, and still one of his best-loved, books. They focus on two of his most famous essays that provide unique insights into his early years. In Such, Such Were the Joys, Orwell wrote about his experience of English boarding school, where he developed an ineradicable sense of himself as intrinsically doomed and disgusting, of a world where bullies will always triumph and where the underdog can never win. In Shooting an Elephant, Orwell recounts his years working for the Indian Police in the 1920s and his realisation that the British Empire was a corrupt, murderous regime. Finally, Sophie and Jonty follow Orwell into the mean streets of Paris’ 5th arrondissement and London’s Whitechapel, the scenes of brutality that follow and a truly bizarre encounter with another Old Etonian in a slum lodging-house. -- 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 and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.socialContent warning: mild bad language Books mentioned: Orwell: The New Life (2023) by DJ Taylor WIFEDOM (2023) by Anna Funder Essays by George OrwellThe Road to Wigan Pier (1937) by George OrwellNineteen Eighty-Four (1949) by George Orwell David Copperfield (1850) by Charles Dickens New Grub Street (1891) by George Gissing Nadja by (1928) Andre Breton Paris Peasant by (1926) Louis Aragon Tom Jones (1749) - as ever - by Henry Fielding Gulliver’s Travels (1726) - as ever - by Jonathan Swift Tales of Mean Streets (1894) by Arthur Morrison People of the Abyss (1904) by Jack London Tropic of Cancer (1934) by Henry Miller Kitchen Confidential (2000) by Anthony Bourdain The Tramp Ward (1904) by Mary Higgs Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908) by WH Davies  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Legendary bestseller Jodi Picoult is also a graduate of the Princeton English Department, and this week she came back to teach class! Sophie recorded a live episode at the Princeton Public Library in front of a packed house of Jodi fans who were delighted to hear why she believes that when it comes to Shakespeare's best plays, a women was holding the quill!Jodi's newest novel "By Any Other Name," tells an intense, gripping story about a real-life woman who might just have written many of Shakespeare's most famous works, including Hamlet, Merchant of Venice and Romeo and Juliet, leaving the Bard himself to run his theatre, make money, and have extra-marital affairs.Emilia Bassano, Jodi's heroine, is a brilliant but under-appreciated writer in the precarious world of the Renaissance court. In real life, Emilia Bassano was a self-made author, lover, mother, and an all-round Elizabethan bad-ass. She published the first collection of poems by a woman in England, and in this live conversation we get a fascinating glimpse of an extraordinary women in an extraordinary time. Jodi takes us through the evidence of of Emilia's "fingerprints" in Shakespeare's plays, and she explains her own original discovery of a sizzling connection between Emilia and the hottest man at court, the Earl of Southampton!"Bardolatry" was a term George Bernard Shaw came up with to describe people who love Shakespeare too much, and Jodi is leading a new vanguard of Bardoloclasts — skeptics who are breaking the myth of Shakespeare to reveal hidden histories behind the legend.Special thanks to Janie Hermann, Becky Bowers and the Princeton Public Library for their support.-- 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 and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.socialProducer: Boyd BrittonDigital Content Coordinator: Olivia di CostanzoDesigner: Peita JacksonOur thanks to the University of Sydney Business School.Content warning: moderate swearing and sexual content Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

By many reckonings, this is the most famous novel in English. It’s also the book Jane Austen described as her own “Darling Child.” As we head to the milestone of Jane’s 250th Birthday in December (get ready for the minced chicken and negus party) Sophie and Jonty dig into one of the most joyful, funny, sexy stories ever told.In this episode we ask why this small novel of village life exploded into a global cultural icon, inspiring retelling upon retelling, and catapulting Mr. Darcy and Lizzie Bennet’s romance into a modern myth.You’ll hear about some lesser-known experiences from Jane Austen’s life that informed the writing, and why it took her so long (aspiring writers, take heart). Sophie tries to shoehorn four historical secrets at the start of the episode, but Jonty only lets her share two of them on air. And he dings her for being too interested in legal history.Instead, the duo argue about why mismatched attraction, or mistaking steamy passion for implacable dislike, is such an evergreen literary trope, and how much Elizabeth’s love of Darcy depends on seeing his enormous house.Both hosts give favorite jokes another outing – listeners can decide if repetition make them more funny. Not as funny as Austen, that’s for sure. Tune in for a tune-up about the original Meet the Parents, a tale of colliding families, ghastly mothers in law, and male bonding activities.-- 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 and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.socialBooks Mentioned or Used as Sources:Rachel Cohen, Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels, 2020.Claudia L. Johnson and Clara Tuite, 30 Great Myths About Jane Austen, 2020.Sandra MacPherson, “Rent to Own, or, What’s Entailed in Pride and Prejudice,” Representations, 2003.Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life, 1999.Fay Weldon, Letters to Alice: On First Reading Jane Austen, 1985.Hilary Davidson "Reconstructing Jane Austen's Silk Pelisse," Costume, vol 49, no. 22, 2015.Producer: Boyd BrittonDigital Content Coordinator: Olivia di CostanzoDesigner: Peita JacksonOur thanks to the University of Sydney Business School. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In Part 2 of David Copperfield, we pick up David where we left him, sobbing at the door of Betsey Trotwood’s house in Dover. From this low, David’s life changes - he is no longer a victim, but embarks on a (very long) journey towards self-reliance, re-encountering old friends like Micawbers and Steerforth, but also new characters like Uriah Heep and the simpering Dora. To make sense of this long, rambling journey of redemption, Sophie and Jonty reveal the influence of the emerging self-help movement on Dickens’ world-view and how his side-hustle as the director of a Home for Homeless Women inspired him to send many of the characters in David Copperfield off to Australia at the end of the book - and the inevitable happy ending this suggests. BOOKS MENTIONED OR USED AS SOURCES: Charles Dickens: A Life (2011) by Claire Tomalin Self-Reliance (1841) by Ralph Waldo Emerson Self-Help (1859) by Samuel Smiles 1848: The Revolution of the Intellectuals (1944) by Lewis Namier Demon Copperhead (2022) by Barbara KingsolverRivals (1988) by Jilly Cooper Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

David Copperfield is the name of an American illusionist, whose feats included levitating over the Grand Canyon, walking through the Great Wall of China and making an airplane disappear. It’s also the name of novel by Charles Dickens. Published in serial form between 1849 and 1850, David Copperfield charts the degradation and eventual success of its narrator - a figure based closely on the author himself. So much so that Dickens later referred to the book as a ‘favourite child’, which considering his self-proclaimed habit of ‘slaughtering’ his child characters is fortunate for Copperfield. David Copperfield is very much A Tale of Two Stories - a literary pun which Jonty is very pleased with. The first story is that of David’s neglect as a child, the second of his adult life as he aspires to a state of self-reliance. In this episode, Sophie and Jonty look at the mid-life crisis that precipitated the writing of Copperfield as Dickens suffered a minor breakdown, excavated memories from his unhappy childhood and distributed increasingly silly names to his many children. We discover the literary innovations that resulted from Dickens choosing to adopt first person narrative for his child star, how he ripped off Charlotte Bronte without acknowledging it, and the vast cast of unforgettable characters like the Micawbers, Betsey Trotwood, and Uriah Heep that carry his story along. Finally, we leave listeners on a cliff-hanger as poor David, homeless and destitute, walks from London to Dover and flings himself at the mercy of his long-lost aunt. What will happen to David? Will he rise to success and levitate across the Grand Canyon? Listen to part 2 to find out. -- 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 and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.socialProducer: Boyd BrittonDigital Content Coordinator: Olivia di CostanzoDesigner: Peita JacksonOur thanks to the University of Sydney Business School.Content warning: moderate swearing and sexual contentBOOKS MENTIONED OR USED AS SOURCES: Charles Dickens: A Life (2011) by Claire Tomalin Tristram Shandy by Laurence SterneTom Jones by Henry FieldingJane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In part 2 of SLoB's Valentine's special, more heroes and heroines from the world of classic books get the brutal Tinder treatment as Sophie and Jonty assess the romantic moves of your literary faves. They are in full agreement concerning the lead characters of Sense & Sensibility and Go Tell It On The Mountain, but the conversation turns fractious as they lock horns over whether Frankenstein or his monster is the greatest lover in Mary Shelley's famous novel. Fortunately, Dracula - that great peacemaker - is on hand to elicit full agreement that he, the Prince of Darkness, is the ideal date.-- 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 and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.socialProducer: Boyd BrittonDigital Content Coordinator: Olivia di CostanzoDesigner: Peita JacksonOur thanks to the University of Sydney Business School.Content warning: moderate swearing and sexual content Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's Black History Month and Sophie and Jonty are bringing their analytical chops once again to the giant of 20th-century literature, James Baldwin. In his debut novel, Go Tell It On the Mountain, Baldwin had captured the experience of growing up in 1930s Harlem. In his second novel, Giovanni’s Room, published in 1956, he focused instead on his experiences as a gay man, living in Paris. But, unlike Baldwin, the narrator of this novel is white. The hero David is torn between two desires - his burgeoning love for an Italian barman called Giovanni, and the imperative to marry his girlfriend Hella. He struggles to choose, but the casualty is Giovanni rather than David. Baldwin wrote Giovanni’s Room while wrestling with his own homosexuality - and his fears about the life of loneliness it condemned him too - and developing new theories about white and black experience in America. Sophie and Jonty talk about the unique experiences behind the writing of this novel, the powerful expression of homosexual desire, and why Paris isn’t all it’s meant to be. Content warning: mild sexual content -- 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 and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.socialProducer: Boyd BrittonDigital Content Coordinator: Olivia di CostanzoDesigner: Peita JacksonOur thanks to the University of Sydney Business School.Further ReadingNotes On A Native Son (1956) by James Baldwin James Baldwin: Living in Fire (Pluto Books, 2019) by Bill V MullenThe Ambassadors by Henry James (1903) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's Valentine's Day and love is quite literally in the air as the Secret Life of Books beams, via a complex network of satellites and data banks, to your ears. In this Bonus Episode, Sophie and Jonty reflect on what they've learnt about love from the classics, and rank the leading men and ladies of the books covered so far as lovers. St Valentine first appears in English literature in Geoffrey Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls and weaves his way via Jane Austen and Charles Dickens through to the present day.In this first part of 2, Sophie and Jonty revisit Picnic at Hanging Rock, which begins with a Valentine's Day picnic gone wrong, and spend far too much time talking about Jane Eyre's Rochester, who somehow - despite driving one woman mad, giving another false teeth as a gift, and getting himself up in drag to woo Jane - is one of literature's great sex symbols. Gullver - of 'Travels' fame - gets a look in, as do Lockwood, Cathy, Hareton and the rest of the kids from Wuthering Heights.Part 2 of this conversation is available on Patreon and will join the main feed on Friday February 21, 2025.Content warning: moderate sexual content and bad language.-- 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 and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.socialProducer: Boyd BrittonDigital Content Coordinator: Olivia di CostanzoDesigner: Peita JacksonOur thanks to the University of Sydney Business School. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

“Now, gods, stand up for bastards!” King Lear is the Mount Everest of Theatre - a sprawling masterpiece of political turmoil, personal betrayal, horrifying gore and great poetry. It makes ‘Succession’ look like The Midsomer Murders. Lear is the pagan king who decides to divides his kingdom between two daughters (and banishing a third), only to find himself outcast, succumbing to madness, adrift in a world collapsing into civil war. Who better to tackle this cautionary tale of domestic and political crisis than Rory Stewart, host of The Rest is Politics, who has watched the downfall of several rulers, in one way or another. For Rory, King Lear is ‘THE’ play. He fell in love with it at school and becomes only more seduced by Lear, as a character, the older he gets. While Sophie and Jonty, in predictable style, try to tie the play to the Reformation and Shakespeare’s personal life respectively, Rory shames them by making the case that some works of art can’t be explained purely by the world around them; that something magic, and beyond Shakespeare’s own control, took place when he booted up his Quill 2.0 and started writing. Rory also admits that, during his political career, he sometimes felt like Goneril to Boris Johnson’s King Lear; and rather yearns to be Lear himself, raging and shouting in the rain. Content warning: the f-word is used thrice.-- 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 and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.socialProducer: Boyd BrittonDigital Content Coordinator: Olivia di CostanzoDesigner: Peita JacksonOur thanks to the University of Sydney Business School. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

One ring to rule them allOne ring to…Yes, SLoB finally turns its Sauron-like eye on what is thought to be the second best-selling novel of all time (after Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities): Lord of the Rings. And who better to share this experience than Dominic Sandbrook, historian of the 20th Century, co-host of the Rest is History podcast, and Tolkien devotee. In this Fellowship of Literary Analysis, Dominic, Sophie and Jonty are united in believing that Lord of the Rings - a novel which, superficially, appears to be about orcs and wizards in a fantasy realm - is in fact one of the greatest novels about the 20th Century. Together, they plunder Tolkien’s work and life to show how seismic events - two world wars, the rise of fascism, industrialisation, environmental disaster - found expression in his sprawling masterpiece.Jonty and Dominic clash, like marauding armies on the plains of Mordor, over whether the many poems and songs in Lord of the Rings are of a quality that the reader deserves. While Sophie embarks on the inevitable digression into the Dead Marshes of the Protestant Reformation. Dominic gives the shock announcement that Tolkien almost called Frodo ‘Bingo’, which would have made for a great episode of Bluey but not for a terrifying novel about good versus evil. Even less so if Tolkien had also followed his original intention to call Aragorn ‘Trotter’ and the Elves ‘Gnomes’. After all, it’s hard to imagine Cate Blanchett signing up for the role of Galadriel, the ethereal gnome Further reading:The Great British Dream Factory: The Strange History of Our National Imagination by Dominic Sandbrook (London: Allen Lane. 2015)JRR Tolkien: A Biography by Humphrey Carpenter (Harper Collins, 1998)-- 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 and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.socialProducer: Boyd BrittonDigital Content Coordinator: Olivia di CostanzoDesigner: Peita JacksonOur thanks to the University of Sydney Business School. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Pulitzer Prize winner, fan-favorite Geraldine Brooks first read Gilead on a packed flight and found herself clambering over passengers for a Kleenex. Find out why Robinson’s quiet, meditative, multi-generational story remains a model and touchstone for one of the most admired and loved novelists writing today. Or, to echo Jonty’s effort to sound like the cool kids: why is Gilead such a stone-cold classic? Geraldine talks openly about love, beauty and her determination not to turn away from the world in a time of global crisis. Sophie talks openly about why Geraldine is her non-consensual mentor for living the Australian-American life right. Will all these caring-sharing vibes make Jonty feel left out? Or, like Barack Obama, is he just another happy fan of this modern masterpiece? -- 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 and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.socialProducer: Boyd BrittonDigital Content Coordinator: Olivia di CostanzoDesigner: Peita JacksonOur thanks to the University of Sydney Business School. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Gilead, from 2004, by the American writer Marilynne Robinson, is a smash-hit novel about Calvinism, three generations of Congregationalist minister and a cat called Soapy. Unlikely trifecta through this is, Gilead is a gorgeous, life-affirming tale that has the distinction of being one of Barack Obama’s favorite books. The Gilead tetralogy - the four novels that make up Robinson’s Gilead cycle, were Oprah’s Book Club pick in 2021 and Robinson is beloved by intellectuals and celebrities alike.Despite all the Calvinism - or maybe because of it - it is a beautiful novel about fatherhood, intergeneration struggle, the legacy of the Civil War, appreciating the everyday beauty of life, about mortality and letting go. Robinson is on public record speaking about the humanity and compassion inherent in puritan theology, its role in leading us out of our global political crises, the conversational, engaging genre of the sermon as a literary form, and why – like Sophie – she thinks the Protestant Reformation is right up there with the invention of cinema and the internet as one of a handful of the most impactful and transformative cultural events of human modernity.-- 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 and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.socialFurther Reading and Listening:Marilynne Robinson, the Gilead novels: Gilead, Home, Lila, Jack.Conversation between Robinson and Obama:https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/11/05/president-obama-marilynne-robinson-conversation/?srsltid=AfmBOoq8ggGJ-bnyvBupbhzTEzu0XzgRR2kSqVWxk2RlHDjvUCaIGLyDPodcast with Marylinne Robinson about Calvinism:https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/marilynne-robinson/Support the showProducer: Boyd BrittonDigital Content Coordinator: Olivia di CostanzoDesigner: Peita JacksonOur thanks to the University of Sydney Business School. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If you think Jane Austen is light and bright and sparkling, think again. In Sense and Sensibility, her first published novel, Jane goes to the dark side. Listeners remembering Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet laughing prettily in pale dresses might be expecting a tale of sisterly affection and romantic walks, while Hugh Grant stammers and charms his way towards inevitable wedlock. Tune in to hear how Austen changes the course of the English novel by writing about teenage girls left homeless, the unfairness of inheritance laws, and vulnerable young women whose lives literally depend on being able to trust the men they love. She weaves in a double tragedy where a mother's and a daughter's lives are destroyed by unwanted pregnancies. Austen writes about chronic anxiety and depression, with wickedly clever barbs and catty character take-downs.Jonty and Sophie discuss the events that led Austen to write this black comedy in the way she did. Hear what was happening in Jane’s seemingly uneventful life that explains the darkness and the scandal of this story, albeit set in delightfully large houses and charming cottages, with a liberal dose of balls, smart carriages, fashionable dresses and even a custom-ordered toothpick-case.-- 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 and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.socialFurther Reading:Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life.Ang Lee, Sense and Sensibility.Rachel Cohen, Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels.D.A. Miller, Jane Austen and the Secret of Style. Section about the toothpick case in Sense and Sensibility.Mentioned in episode: William Cowper, Austen’s favourite poet. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/william-cowper Support the showProducer: Boyd BrittonDigital Content Coordinator: Olivia di CostanzoDesigner: Peita JacksonOur thanks to the University of Sydney Business School. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Right Ho, Jeeves was the 34th novel by the British writer PG Wodehouse, written when he was - struggling writers take note - 52 years old. But you would never guess this. It is fresh, energetic, joyful, structurally perfect and one of a handful of books that might be considered Wodehouse’s masterpiece. The story follows the escapades of hopeless toff Bertie Wooster and his mentally superior butler Jeeves as they tackle the romantic woes of Bertie’s friends, the demands of his formidable Aunt Dahlia, and bicker over matters of fashion, all against the romantic, timeless backdrop of a large English country-house. Join Sophie and Jonty as they uncover Wodehouse’s emotionally-starved childhood, during which he was brought up by nannies, aunts and school matrons while his parents sweated the benefits of imperialism in Hong Kong. How he perfected the Jeeves and Wooster characters while his neighbour and friend on Long Island, F Scott Fitzgerald, wrote The Great Gatsby. How he enjoyed the side hustle to end all side hustles as lyricist for the great composer Jerome Kern. How the secret to understanding Jeeves may lie in the opening chapters of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. How Wodehouse dedicated Right Ho, Jeeves - arguably his masterpiece - to his tax lawyer of all people. And how, having achieved fame and fortune as one of the best-loved novelists in both Britain and the United States, Wodehouse torpedoed his reputation by broadcasting a series of Nazi-friendly radio essays for Goebbels in Berlin during the Second World War, joking that the only issue between the Allies and the Nazis was a lack of mutual understanding, that he was no longer proud to be English, and that he would give the Nazis all of ‘India’ if they’d let him go home. Further reading: Wodehouse: A Life by Robert McCrum -- 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 and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.socialSupport the showProducer: Boyd BrittonDigital Content Coordinator: Olivia di CostanzoDesigner: Peita JacksonOur thanks to the University of Sydney Business School. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Elizabeth Strout’s My Name Is Lucy Barton is a much-loved and perennially-read novel that has caught the attention of literally millions of readers worldwide. But it’s quiet, low-key book, about family dynamics and difficult feelings, with a modest plot and characters who wouldn’t seem heroic if you met them in real life. Find out why Charlotte Wood found herself drawn to a novel that refuses to be a “people pleaser.” How does it connect to her own novel Stone Yard Devotional, shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. Charlotte also unearths one of SLoB’s best-ever secrets about how Elizabeth Strout trained herself to write with radical honesty. Sophie waxes lyrical about the landscapes of Strout’s homestate Maine, and Jonty makes a passionate care for My Name is Lucy Barton as a classic about men as well as women, equally compelling for the blokes.-- 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 and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.socialFurther Reading:Elizabeth Strout, My Name is Lucy Barton, Anything is Possible, Oh William, Lucy by the Sea, Tell Me Everything, (Random House, 2016-2024)Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional (Riverhead/ Allen and Unwin, 2024)https://www.charlottewood.com.au/Support the showProducer: Boyd BrittonDigital Content Coordinator: Olivia di CostanzoDesigner: Peita JacksonOur thanks to the University of Sydney Business School. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.