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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

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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1:17:21

Hercule Poirot, a Tunisian dagger and an evening of...

Secret Life of Books ·

2025/04/22

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

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1:04:03

Who watches the Watchmen?: Alan Moore and Dave...

Secret Life of Books ·

2025/04/15

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,

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58:07

SLoB's Secret Life of Pets

Secret Life of Books ·

2025/04/07

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

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55:49

George Orwell 6: What's in Room 101? 1984 Part 2

Secret Life of Books ·

2025/04/04

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

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57:41

George Orwell 5: Sex crime, anyone? 1984 pt1

Secret Life of Books ·

2025/04/01

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

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1:00:06

George Orwell 4: Come on, Eileen! Anna Funder, Mrs...

Secret Life of Books ·

2025/03/28

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

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1:20:13

George Orwell 3: Murder in the Barnyard: Animal Farm

Secret Life of Books ·

2025/03/25

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

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54:19

World Poetry Day Double-Bill: Can poetry change the...

Secret Life of Books ·

2025/03/21

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

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1:23:03

George Orwell 2: The Revolution SHOULD NOT be...

Secret Life of Books ·

2025/03/18

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

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104 results

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