Secret Life of Books
Episodes
The world's most famous classicist on the world's most famous classic: Mary Beard and The Odyssey
26 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Odyssey - where stories began. Probably written down around 7th century BC - give or take a few centuries either way - by somebody or somebodies w...
Bonus Live Ep: hosts' secrets revealed and the classics stripped bare!
22 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Co-hosts Sophie and Jonty bare all in a bonus SLoB live ep! After months of rummaging through the dirty laundry of the great writers, it is only fair ...
Jane Austen does gothic horror with insta-ready clothes and great interiors: Northanger Abbey
19 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Henry Tilney: is he yet another of Jane Austen’s Bad Men, or the stealth MVP with his interest in dress fabrics and interior decorating? Northanger ...
James: National Book Award global hit; a Huck Finn rewrite the world needed; plot twists you'll never guess
12 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
It took 140 years for someone to write back to Mark Twain’s brilliant but troubling masterpiece The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Now the celebrat...
Huckleberry Finn: but wait, maybe THIS is the great American novel?
05 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What makes a trip down the Mississippi river so famous - and so notorious? Why did it need to be rewritten in the 2024 novel James by Percival Everett...
Hamnet: sexy witches replace skulls and soliloquies
29 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Ever wonder what Shakespeare got up to in the bedroom? Well, whether you do or not, you’ll find out - along with many other things - in this episode...
Hamlet: Shakespeare's secret double or pain in neck?
22 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Hamlet is jammed with famous quotes like “to be or not to be,” “something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” “time is out of joint,” “t...
Midsummer Nights Dream: are true love and sexual attraction magic tricks?
15 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
“The course of true love never did run smooth.” It certainly did not in Shakespeare’s psychedelic fantasy about cross-dressing, polyamory, spea...
Go Tell It On The Mountain: growing up Black, poor and gay in 1930s New York
08 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Go Tell It On The Mountain is one of the great incendiary debuts of the 20th Century. Published in 1953, James Baldwin’s autobiographical novel foll...
The Great Gatsby: is this THE great American novel?
01 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Few novels capture a moment and place in time as The Great Gatsby. F Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 masterpiece captures a generation determined to live an...
To Kill a Mockingbird: racism, gun violence and coming of age in the 1930s South
24 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Within a year of its publication in 1960, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird sold 2.5 million copies and has remained a much-loved classic by adults...
Wolf Hall: is this the best historical novel ever written?
17 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Hello Thomas Cromwell. And Hello Lev Grossman, best-selling author of The Magicians trilogy, the Silver Arrow children’s books, and now The Bright S...
Dracula: vampires even weirder than you think. And they may have started WWI
08 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Twenty-first century vampires are the brooding, sparkly anti-heroes of Twilight and Ann Rice— all pointy teeth and hair-product. But they used to be...
Frankenstein: the ultimate monster; the first A.I story; Mary Shelly's multi-generational grief
02 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Frankenstein is English literature’s great myth about Artificial Intelligence, 200 years before A.I. existed. But the world’s most famous monster ...
Wuthering Heights: passionate love affairs and dysfunctional families go together
26 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A ghostly face in the dark, a child’s hand through the window, a doleful cry: “I’d lost my way on the moor! - I’ve been a waif for twenty year...
Wide Sargasso Sea 2: bohemianism, madess and celebrity back in England
05 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
It should have taken a year. It took thirty. In writing Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys endured several mental breakdowns, was arrested numerous times fo...
Wide Sargasso Sea 1: tropical gothic in the West Indies and Jane Eyre disrupted
05 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, published in 1966, is a bold riposte to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, humanising the mad woman in Mr Rochester’s a...
Jane Eyre 2: the Brontes' real lives are even wilder than their fiction
02 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
When Charlotte Bronte arrived in Brussels at the age of 26 to attend finishing school, she had no idea she would fall desperately in love with the dir...
Jane Eyre 1: passion, madness, gaslighting and bad hair days
02 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What on earth was going on in the parlour of Haworth Parsonage in the Yorkshire Moors that caused three sisters to write three of the greatest novels ...
Gulliver's Travels Part 2
04 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
As we learned in episode one, Gulliver’s Travels is the gloriously unhinged invention of the dirty-minded genius Jonathan Swift, who was also the gr...
Gulliver's Travels Part 1
04 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Gulliver’s Travels is one of the most popular books of all time, but it’s no mere child’s tale. It’s the GOAT of political satires – mad, di...
Macbeth: terrorism, gunpowder and treason in James I's London
28 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Macbeth, which actors superstitiously call the Scottish Play, is one of Shakespeare’s shortest and most exciting dramas. It’s also the most horrif...
Alice in Wonderland: rabbit-holes, mad mathematics and the elephant in the room
21 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Alice in Wonderland is one of the most widely translated and quoted books in the world, and yet it is - quite literally - nonsense. How was it ushered...
Secret Life of Books Trailer
21 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Secret Life of Books is a fascinating, addictive, often shocking,occasionally hilarious weekly podcast starring Sophie Gee, professor ofEnglish at...