Sophie Gee
speaker
11,180 appearances
40 recordings
3 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 2d ago
Sophie Gee’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 36 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 7.
Appearances
talented and...
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Not just pleasant people, but actually quite adept poets and good writers were just effaced from the literary
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for the next 300 years.
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And actually some of them are now coming back and being recognised as quite interesting writers.
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But Pope, you know, he, well, he dropped them into the quaking mud and sewer of the Thames successfully.
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All right, so I'm jumping us forward a bit more than a century.
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And I'm taking us into a moment, I think, where the Thames becomes this kind of conduit for a certain kind of narrative about London.
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So we've seen that the Thames is, it's dirty, it's dark, but it's also in some ways, this kind of glorious symbol of trade and commerce and bustling movement.
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It's
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It's a place where the aristocracy go up and down in their fine boats.
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It's associated with the court, but it's also associated with these literary competitors.
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I'm taking us to Dickens's London now.
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On the book club, we're doing Bleak House at the moment, which is shaped by the...
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allegory and the and the literal reality of the fogs of London in the middle of the 19th century which as we've said often were not fogs in in the traditional sense it was a form of really extreme air pollution from industry having moved into the city of London and all and surrounds and just completely choking the air so similar things are happening with the the river
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which at this point is not just full of dead dogs, but full of dead bodies.
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And the unforgettable opening of Our Mutual Friend, which is a really terrific Dickens novel, consists of a waterman, someone who for a living takes a boat out on the Thames, going up and down with his daughter looking for a dead body.
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And here's how it starts.
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In these times of ours, though concerning the exact year there is no need to be precise, a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance with two figures in it floated on the Thames between Southwark Bridge, which is of iron, and London Bridge, which is of stone, as an autumn evening was closing in.
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The figures in this boat were those of a strong man with ragged, grizzled hair and a sun-browned face and a dark girl of 19 or 20, sufficiently like him to be recognizable as his daughter.
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The girl rowed, which is in and of itself really interesting that she's doing the rowing.
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Showing 521–540 of 11,180 · page 27 of 559
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