Secret Life of Books
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Secret Life of Books
Every book has two stories: the one it tells, and the one it hides.The Secret Life of Books is a fascinating, addictive, often shocking, occasionally hilarious weekly podcast starring Sophie Gee, an English professor at Princeton University, and Jonty Claypole, formerly director of arts at the BBC.&...
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Montaigne pt2: A Montaigne out of a mole hill (with Rowan Tomlinson)
Jonty and Sophie were separated by an ocean while Sophie and her family went back to New York and Jonty stayed in Sydney - so they made lemonade out o...
Montaigne pt1: Climb Every Montaigne (with Stephen Greenblatt)
Sophie talks to one of the world's leading literary scholars, who co-founded a whole branch of literary studies known as "The New Historicism," before...
SLoB's Four (literary) weddings and a funeral
The label says what's in the tin: Secret Life of Books dives deep into weddings and funerals in literature, asking why they become iconic moments to h...
Wilkie Collins 2: The Moonstone
With The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins published yet another giant sensation, this time pioneering the detective novel and mystery/heist genre. It was pub...
BONUS: Jennifer Egan on the Woman in White
As part of our ongoing “That’s Classic!” series, we're joined by the wonderful Jennifer Egan to chat about the sensational thriller The Woman in White...
Wilkie Collins 1: The Woman in White
The Woman in White was a sensation when it was serialised in Charles Dickens’ magazine All The Year Round in 1859 and 1860. It begins with an uncanny...
SLOB Reads: The Sonnet with Paul Muldoon
For several weeks we've been recording a subscribers-only mini series on the history of the sonnet in English. Sonnets are crowd-pleasers - short, som...
The Secret Life of Trains: how rail travel changed fiction - for ever
It was five o’clock on a winter’s morning in Syria. Alongside the platform at Aleppo stood the train grandly designated in railway guides as the Tauru...
BONUS: Writing Virginia Woolf's life (with Hermione Lee)
In this final episode in SLoB's series on Virginia Woolf, Jonty talks to literary biographer Hermione Lee whose Virginia Woolf (1996) is perhaps the m...
Virginia Woolf 5: The Waves
We thought we’d be concluding our Virginia Woolf deep-dive with "A Room of One’s Own," but we’ve enjoyed this series so much we decided to extend. Tod...
Virginia Woolf 4: A Room Of One's Own
Thank God, my long toil at the women’s lecture is this moment ended. I am back from speaking at Girton, in floods of rain. Starved but valiant young w...
Virginia Woolf 3: Orlando
Virginia Woolf wrote Orlando, a gender-defying historical romance, in 1927, when her intimate friend and lover Vita Sackville-West left London to join...
BONUS: Reading Mrs Dalloway (with Alexandra Schwartz)
"Throw that party. Go for it. It's worth it."
In today’s Mrs. Dalloway special episode, Sophie talks to Alex Schwartz, writer, critic and co-hos...
Virginia Woolf 2: To The Lighthouse
50 is the new 25!
“To the Lighthouse” is Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece about summer holidays and the passage of time. It’s perhaps the greatest n...
BONUS: Virginia Woolf, the not-so-Common Reader (with Alexandra Harris)
‘Think of a book as a very dangerous and exciting game, which it takes two to play at.’
For Virginia Woolf, reading wasn’t a passive act...
Virginia Woolf 1: Mrs Dalloway
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Not the Secret Life of Books, as we joyfully immerse ourselves in four of Woolf's greatest books to celebrate what is...
Smells Like Teen Spirit: The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole
Martin Amis’ Money, Thomas Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero… These books are often cited as defining works of th...
The Secret River with Kate Grenville
This special episode on a great modern classic was recorded live at the Sydney Writers' Festival in 2025. Very few novels can genuinely claim to have...
Keeping Up Appearances with the Pooters: The Diary of A Nobody
This episode is a cheat. It's not a real published personal diary, but a satire on published diaries. It’s a fiction, but it’s a fiction that tells us...
The Secret Life of Summer Holidays: sunburns, family arguments and holiday cottages in classic literature
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Not if it was the summer holiday that Jonty's family went on to Menorca when a stomach bug ripped through thei...
BONUS: Move Over Bridgerton: James Boswell's Big Romance
A bonus episode to share the extraordinary detail and richness of the real-time, live-streamed account James Boswell gives us of his first love affair...
A Date With Signor Gonorrhea: James Boswell's London Journal 1762
It’s London, 1763 - we're paying a visit to the most fashionable, literary, sexy, filthy, glamorous capital in the world.
The 22 year old James...
Plague, fire and hanky-panky in Swinging 1660s London: Samuel Pepys' Diary
Welcome to London in the swinging sixties. One man fights off a towering inferno, navigates a zombie apocalypse, and an invading fleet of evil foreign...
Breakfast with Jane Austen
Breakfast is the most important meal of the day -- especially for Jane Austen. On and off the page, Austen paid a lot of attention to the breakfast ta...
Oscar Wilde 4: Doing rhyme: The Ballad of Reading Gaol
In this episode - the last in our series on Oscar Wilde - we tell the story of the melodramatic, mediagenic, mad, melancholy end of Oscar Wilde's writ...
Life and love with MND: Lisa Genova's Every Note Played with Prof Dominic Rowe
Published in 2018, Lisa Genova’s Every Note Played follows the experiences of renowned concert pianist Richard Evans from the moment he is diagnosed w...
Oscar Wilde 3: "A Handbag?!" The Importance of Being Earnest
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 grea...
Happier with Henry Wotton: Gretchen Rubin on Aphorisms and the Importance of Being Oscar Wilde
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...
Oscar Wilde 2: If Looks Could Kill: The Picture of Dorian Gray
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 in...
Classic Books vs Trump: Jill Lepore on reading her way through the first 100 days
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'...
Oscar Wilde 1: The Happy Prince and Other Stories
Few writers have blurred the boundaries between life and art quite so spectacularly as Oscar Wilde. In his writing, he challenged the moral standards...
BONUS: More 'Rivals': Actor Katherine Parkinson on the joy of Jilly Cooper and playing Lizzie Vereker in the television adaptation
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 adapt...
Bollinger, Board Battles and Bonking Galore: Jilly Cooper's Rivals
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. I...
The Epic of Gilgamesh with Robert Macfarlane
The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the oldest surviving works of literature - an epic poem from ancient Mesopotamia, stitched together from fragments goi...
The Tortured Poets Department: Emily Dickinson, the Transcendentalists and, yes, Taylor Swift
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...
BONUS: Secret Life of Democracy (Literature at the polls)
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 can...
Guns and (war of the) Roses. The irresistible rise of Shakespeare's Richard III
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 Towe...
BONUS: The Disappearance of Agatha Christie
On 3 December 1926, only a few months after the publication of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (in book form), Agatha Christie mysteriously disappeared, l...
Hercule Poirot, a Tunisian dagger and an evening of Mah Jong: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
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 C...
Who watches the Watchmen?: Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen
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 i...