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PODCAST

Secret Life of Books

Sophie Gee and Jonty Claypole

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.Every week these virtuoso critics and close friends take an iconic book and reveal the hidden story behind the story: who made it, their clandestine motives, the undeclared stakes, the scandalous backstory

arts books

All Episodes

1:04:19

The Secret Life of Trains: how rail travel changed...

Secret Life of Books ·

2025/09/16

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 Taurus Express. So Agatha Christie began her sleeper [car] hit, Murder on the Orient Express (1934).All aboard! In the latest of SLoB's much-loved special episodes on surprising, fun, and always deeply revealing literary themes, Sophie and Jonty take an all-stations train journey through literary locomotion. One of life's great pleasures is reading a good

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43:40

BONUS: Writing Virginia Woolf's life (with Hermione Lee)

Secret Life of Books ·

2025/09/12

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 most respected account of her life and art in a world not short on them. Hermione talks about the challenges in writing about somebody who had such firm views on what a biography should and shouldn't be. Woolf's father, Leslie Stephen, was, after all, the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography and one of her closest friends, Lytton Strachey,

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57:11

Virginia Woolf 5: The Waves

Secret Life of Books ·

2025/09/09

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. Today we’re looking at the book which many Woolf obsessives consider her masterpiece. Woolf published The Waves in 1931, just two years after her string of masterpieces, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and “A Room of One’s Own.” As Sophie and Jonty will tell you, it’s the Big Chill – or the Breakfast Club – of Woolf’s oevre. A story about a group

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1:09:41

Virginia Woolf 4: A Room Of One's Own

Secret Life of Books ·

2025/09/01

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 women – that’s my impression.That’s what Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary after delivering the lectures that became “A Room of One’s Own,” arguably the most important feminist manifesto of the twentieth century. Students attending the lectures reported they were a total snooze; one eyewitness actually fell asleep. But another said that the spectacle of

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1:20:20

Virginia Woolf 3: Orlando

Secret Life of Books ·

2025/08/26

Virginia Woolf wrote Orlando, a gender-defying historical romance, in 1927, when her intimate friend and lover Vita Sackville-West left London to join her diplomat husband Harold Nicholson in Tehran. Orlando is a love-story set across 300 years of English history, starting in the Elizabethan court and finishing in 1920s England. It features an irresistible protagonist who is both woman and man; a writer and a lover; an aristocrat and a commoner. The novel gifts us a joyful romp through English

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29:39

BONUS: Reading Mrs Dalloway (with Alexandra Schwartz)

Secret Life of Books ·

2025/08/22

"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-host of the New Yorker Magazine’s Critics at Large pod. On “Critics at Large’ she discusses the most urgent cultural matters, ranging from Sesame Street to the Pope to Meaghan and Harry to Ancient Rome. Which is why we knew we needed Alex on the show.It started when Sophie heard Alex discussing Jane Austen with a playful rigor that rarely comes with Austen-itis

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1:09:44

Virginia Woolf 2: To The Lighthouse

Secret Life of Books ·

2025/08/19

“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.50 is the new 25!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

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34:55

BONUS: Virginia Woolf, the not-so-Common Reader (with...

Secret Life of Books ·

2025/08/15

‘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

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1:13:56

Virginia Woolf 1: Mrs Dalloway

Secret Life of Books ·

2025/08/12

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

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1:07:30

Smells Like Teen Spirit: The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole

Secret Life of Books ·

2025/08/05

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

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54:08

The Secret River with Kate Grenville

Secret Life of Books ·

2025/07/29

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

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1:15:50

Keeping Up Appearances with the Pooters: The Diary of...

Secret Life of Books ·

2025/07/22

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

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49:49

The Secret Life of Summer Holidays: sunburns, family...

Secret Life of Books ·

2025/07/15

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

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24:21

BONUS: Move Over Bridgerton: James Boswell's Big Romance

Secret Life of Books ·

2025/07/11

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

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1:20:57

A Date With Signor Gonorrhea: James Boswell's London...

Secret Life of Books ·

2025/07/08

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

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1:19:13

Plague, fire and hanky-panky in Swinging 1660s...

Secret Life of Books ·

2025/07/01

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

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52:19

Breakfast with Jane Austen

Secret Life of Books ·

2025/06/24

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

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1:27:09

Oscar Wilde 4: Doing rhyme: The Ballad of Reading Gaol

Secret Life of Books ·

2025/06/17

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,

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40:32

Life and love with MND: Lisa Genova's Every Note...

Secret Life of Books ·

2025/06/13

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

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1:24:35

Oscar Wilde 3: "A Handbag?!" The Importance of Being...

Secret Life of Books ·

2025/06/10

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

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