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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

1:15:50

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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42:42

Happier with Henry Wotton: Gretchen Rubin on...

Secret Life of Books ·

2025/06/06

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

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1:20:30

Oscar Wilde 2: If Looks Could Kill: The Picture of...

Secret Life of Books ·

2025/06/03

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

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26:20

Classic Books vs Trump: Jill Lepore on reading her...

Secret Life of Books ·

2025/05/27

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

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1:15:11

Oscar Wilde 1: The Happy Prince and Other Stories

Secret Life of Books ·

2025/05/20

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

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41:17

BONUS: More 'Rivals': Actor Katherine Parkinson on...

Secret Life of Books ·

2025/05/16

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. Hosted on Acast. See

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58:00

Bollinger, Board Battles and Bonking Galore: Jilly...

Secret Life of Books ·

2025/05/13

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

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50:26

The Epic of Gilgamesh with Robert Macfarlane

Secret Life of Books ·

2025/05/09

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

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1:12:42

The Tortured Poets Department: Emily Dickinson, the...

Secret Life of Books ·

2025/05/06

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

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1:12:42

BONUS: Secret Life of Democracy (Literature at the...

Secret Life of Books ·

2025/05/02

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

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1:17:18

Guns and (war of the) Roses. The irresistible rise of...

Secret Life of Books ·

2025/04/29

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

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29:07

BONUS: The Disappearance of Agatha Christie

Secret Life of Books ·

2025/04/25

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

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93 results

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