Secret Life of Books

Epizódy

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  Secret Life of the British Museum 15.09.2026 1h

  Viriginia Woolf hated it and Karl Marx loved it. Woolf starts her iconic A Room of One’s Own by skewering it as a monument to British patriarchy and toxic masculinity.The inevitable sequel to lunching and dining at Oxbridge seemed, unfortunately, to be a visit to the British Museum, she wrote.Friend of the show George Eliot, author of Middlemarch, wholeheartedly agreed, and usually sent her husband to do her research for her, in order to avoid the British Museum's oppressive vibes. These women were describing their allergic reaction to the Reading Room, which is now the British Library building near Kings Cross. But the vast collection of global antiquities, including the Rosetta Stone, the Elgin Marbles and the Sutton Hoo treasure, have always been, like the Reading Room itself, matters of divided opinion, polarizing controversy and simmering international tensions.Is the British Museum a treasure hoard stolen almost entirely from other nations’ riches (Lord Byron thought so)? Or in bringing these objects together, in a self-conscious display of the power and fallibility of human empires, does the British Museum show something truly profound and sobering about the nature of human endeavor (its founder, Hans Sloane, took this view). Almost every London writer had opinions on the matter, and in this episode Sophie and Jonty retrace their steps and visit a handful of the most controversial treasures in the collection. Love it or hate it, the British Museum has catalyzed some of English iiterature’s greatest moments.With thanks to the Ponder & See Foundation for their support.Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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  Secret Life of Reading (with Maggie O'Farrell and Ben Alderson-Day) 08.09.2026 54min

  This episode was recorded at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, with literary superstar Maggie O'Farrell and one of Britain's leading psychologists, Ben Alderson-Day.On the Secret Life of Books, we talk about classic books and the life and times of the people who wrote them. In this conversation we talk about you - the readers. What happens when we read a book? What is going on our minds? Why can the experience of staring at words on a page be so intense, life-changing even? Is it just a case of impressions and ideas transferring from an author’s words into our imagination, or is there something more mystical, nay uncanny, at work too? Maggie and Ben reflect on the experience of being readers, and how that can transform being a writer. Maggie is the author of 10 novels, including the acclaimed and recently adapted Hamnet, and her newest book, Land. Ben is a Professor of Psychology at Durham University, author of Presence: The Strange Science of the Unseen Other, and Director of the Readerbank project - a collaborative research project with the Edinburgh Book Festival into how we read, imagine and understand stories. With thanks to the Ponder & See Foundation for their support.Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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  Secret Life of Edinburgh 01.09.2026 59min

  SLOB is in Edinburgh for the International Book Festival. Join us on a walking tour of literary Edinburgh. From Mary Queen of Scots and James VI of Scotland, obsessed with witch hunts and an early anti-tobacco campaigner, to Muriel Spark and slum tourism in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. We walk from the gentrified streets of Marchmont and Bruntsfield, across the Meadows, and into the rough and tumble of the Old Town, a maze of cobbled streets and old buildings crowded on the hillside below the Edinburgh Castle. Cameos from Ian Rankin and Kate Atkinson, William Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, and of course, Sir Walter Scott. Come through Edinburgh with SLOB and relish its very pungent history in a world before modern sanitation.Mr. Johnson and I walked arm-in-arm up the High-street, to my house in James’s court: it was a dusky night: I could not prevent his being assailed by the evening effluvia of Edinburgh. … As we marched slowly along, he grumbled in my ear, ‘I smell you in the dark!’ But he acknowledged that the breadth of the street, and the loftiness of the buildings on each side, made a noble appearance.With thanks to the Ponder & See Foundation for their support.Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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  Secret Life of Trains 2 (Choo choo!) 31.08.2026 37min

  This week SLOB went full steam ahead from London to Edinburgh, to appear live at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. We love classic books, and we love trains, so what better way to while away the 6 hour slow-train to Edinburgh than to record our second episode about literary railway journeys. Join Sophie and Jonty as they choose sandwiches at Euston Station, board the 12:40 to Scotland via Wigan and Penrith, and talk about their favorite train lit. Savor the authenticity of the train-talk, while wedged in the gangway between the toilets and the trash bin, periodically interrupted by skeptical passengers en route to the snacks carriage. Choo choo!!A fun bonus - just because.Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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  Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde 25.08.2026 1h 23min

  We’re aware that Chaucer’s epic poem Troilus and Criseyde written in the 1380s might be a tough sell to even the most devoted SLoB listener, but bear with us. Troilus and Criseyde is not a novel, but it bears a lot of features that we associate with novels and reading this novel-length poem takes you into the world and minds of medieval England - albeit transposed to Ancient Troy - by someone who was living there. It has action, betrayal and a racy sex scene. It gives us a new kind of access to characters' inner lives, and it reveals that inwardly people are wildly different from the way they appear. This is a love story that doesn't conform to any of our expectations about medieval love, and a war story that doesn't comply with our expectations of war. There are so many firsts here. We see the invention of the famous British sense of humour captured in real-time by Chaucer, the very guy who invented it. It features the first reconstructed male concerned with consent in literary history and the first dumping by text message - although obviously there’s no phone involved. Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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  Charlotte Higgins on Ukrainian Lessons: Art in a Time of War 21.08.2026 50min

  Charlotte Higgins talks to Jonty about her new book, Ukrainian Lessons, which recounts her experiences the last four years reporting on the cultural life of a nation at war. Culture is never far from the front-line in time of conflict, but rarely more so than in Ukraine. Part of Putin’s attempts to legitimise the war lies in an age-old argument that Ukraine is simply an extension, or part of, Russia itself. He has personally written essays explaining his view that Ukrainian language and culture is simply part of a Greater Russia story. Not surprisingly, Ukrainians are proving him wrong with the current flourishing of poetry, writing and art that speaks to the uniqueness and separateness of their culture.Charlotte talks about how she went to Ukraine, what she found and why her belief in the power of poetry and art has never been greater.Charlotte is Chief Culture Writer for The Guardian, a classicist and host of Instant Classics podcast.Content warning: as you might expect from an episode about a contemporary war, some of the stories and experiences that Charlotte recounts are confronting.Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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  James Joyce 3: Ulysses 18.08.2026 1h 9min

  Ulysses is a vast novel - over a quarter of a million words. Yet it follows the action of less than 24 hours. To be fair, Joyce packs a lot into that 24 hours. Although our old friend Stephen Daedalus and Leopold Bloom dominate the action, there are over 200 named characters. And, as ever, the most important character is Dublin itself.  The story and structure is loosely modelled on The Odyssey with the different chapters named after episodes in Homer’s poem. The first section follows Stephen Daedalus, just as The Odyssey begins with Odysseus’ son Telemachus. Then Leopold Bloom, a 38 year old Jewish advertising canvasser, takes centre stage with Odysseus’ various adventures given modern-day, satirical equivalents. At the climax, Leopold and Stephen are united and return home, where Molly Bloom - the Penelope of the story - has the final word. The word is ‘yes’, although this is one of the rare occasions where one hearkens after a curmudgeonly ‘no’. So… like Odysseus finally reaching Ithaca, we have finally reached Ulysses after referring to it, usually in disparaging terms, over the life of this podcast. And the question is, how are we going to approach it? Are we going to fall to our knees and kiss the shores? Or will we grab bow and arrow and lay waste to the palace? And if you’re concerned we’re sounding just a little too flip, it’s worth remembering that Joyce himself said that Ulysses ‘is fundamentally a humorous work’, filled with word-play, toilet humour and irreverence.Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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  Greek Lessons by Han Kang 11.08.2026 1h 8min

  This week we take a – somewhat unplanned – detour from our James Joyce sequence, which we put on pause while we finished reading the book! We're taking the chance to include in our series on modern Odysseys an episode we recorded a while ago on the 2024 Nobel Prize winner Han Kang’s masterly short novel Greek Lessons.Written in Korean and set in Seoul, Greek Lessons is another moment in which a modern writer takes on the characters and preoccupations of the Odyssey and reinvents them to tell a story about Korea's complex history. Greek Lessons is about an Ancient Greek teacher in Seoul who is losing his sight, and a Korean student who has lost her capacity to speak.The title and opening sentences of Greek Lessons take us directly to big, epic stories about prophecy, blindness and insight, referring among others to the blinded prophet Tiresias, who gives Odysseus predictions about what awaits him in his attempt to return to Ithaca. The novel starts with a reference to the great Argentinian writer Jeorg Luis Borges. As his dying wish, Borges requested the epitaph ‘He took the sword and laid the naked metal between them.’ What Han Kang doesn’t tell us (we’re meant to figure it out) is that Borges went blind in his 50s he became Argentina’s national librarian and learned Old English so he could read Beowulf and other Norse sagas. Across all her novels Kang tells stories of pain, loss and suffering as pathways to unexpected transformation and freedom. She connects her themes directly to the long histories of violence in North and South Korea and she also wants readers to know she’s talking about all suffering and violence over human history, including in the archaic Greek past.Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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  James Joyce 2: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 04.08.2026 59min

  One evening in 1898, the 16-year-old James Joyce lost his virginity with a sex worker on a canal bank in Dublin. The event would become the main event in his autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published the same year as Dubliners in 1914.Joyce’s sexual awakening prompted both a spiritual crisis and a renewed determination to be a great writer. Portrait tells the story of Joyce’s avatar, Stephen Daedalus, from childhood to graduation. Ultimately, it is about Daedalus’ hard-won rejection of all the baggage of late 19th Century Irish society - religion, morality, English intellectual colonization, and the social stagnation of Dubliners (discussed last week). Daedalus, of course, was the inventor of Greek myth who made himself wings to escape his prison - and the book ends with Stephen escaping the prison of his childhood by turning to the supposed intellectual freedom of Europe. While being well known for its treatment of sexual awakening, the book is also famous for Joyce’s enthusiastic adoption of the stream-of-consciousness technique emerging in European literature, in which the narrative follows the trajectory of the characters thoughts.In this episode, we look at the intellectual journey Joyce took between 1907 - when he started writing Portrait - and 1914, when Ezra Pound had it published.Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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  Emily Wilson, the Odyssey and Why Epics Matter 03.08.2026 34min

  We’ve been saving this one up for a special occasion – a live conversation with Professor Emily Wilson, the celebrated translator of Homer’s Odyssey and the version on which Christopher Nolan’s film is said to be based. Emily has long been revered in the academic world, and she’s currently the toast of the internet for remarks about the Nolan adaptation not having enough sex or nice food on display (here on SLOB, we agree!)Back in February 2026, Sophie hosted a conversation live in Princeton, with Emily, and the brilliant academic rising star of epic poems, Prof. Pasquale Toscano. In this crackling discussion, the talk turns quickly to why epics matter, what they mean, and how they pass their brilliance across time and place. Emily and Pasquale say lots of surprisingly, trenchant and thought-provoking things about why epics are such an important form, both then and now.Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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  A Podcast of One's Own x SLOB: Special Collaboration 29.07.2026 54min

  For this extra special A Podcast of One’s Own × The Secret Life of Books crossover, former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Sophie Gee sit down to celebrate their shared love of books and reading.Julia and Sophie compare notes on hosting book podcasts, share their lifelong love of literature, and reflect on their experiences chairing two of the world's leading literary prizes for women and non-binary writers – the Women's Prize for Fiction and the Stella Prize.Hosted by Julia Gillard, A Podcast of One's Own brings listeners extraordinary stories from remarkable women shaping the world through their work. Alongside these conversations, Julia's Book Club – co-hosted by Kathy Lette and Sarah Holland-Batt – celebrates brilliant books by women each fortnight.Hosted by Sophie Gee and Jonty Claypole, The Secret Life of Books uncovers the hidden stories behind the world's most iconic books, revealing the scandalous backstories, secret meanings and surprising histories that have shaped the way we read them.We hope you'll enjoy this conversation as much as we enjoyed having it.Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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  James Joyce 1: Dubliners 28.07.2026 1h 20min

  Next in our overview of Odysseys, we embark on an epic journey of our own toward the endless tome masterpiece James Joyce’s Ulysses. No reader comes to Joyce without preconceptions. Was he the greatest literary genius of the 20th century? Or a pretentious drunkard and misogynist? Was he an Irish patriot and torchbearer for Irish cultural revival? Or a Francophile ex-pat who gave Ireland the slip early on?For most of us, though, he’s just a guy in little glasses and a hat who wrote a very long book that is almost impossible to read.So for those who aren’t sure what to make of James Joyce, this is your perfect starter pack.But as befits an Odyssey, we’re not going directly to Ulysses. We’re backing up and looking at Joyce’s two earlier books, also set in Dublin, also deeply indebted to the Odyssey. These are Dubliners, his book of 15 short stories, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a novel, both published in 1914, the year in which WWI started.Joyce thought he would publish Dubliners in 1907, but a very fraught, complicated and frankly pretty bratty series of fights between Joyce and his Dublin publisher – along with a lot of other messy life circumstances – meant that it wouldn’t be published for another seven years. As Sophie and Jonty guide listeners through the long and winding — often whining — road to Dubliners, we ask how it’s a version of Homer’s Odyssey, how it lays out Joyce’s creative vision, and what it tells us about the kind of man James Joyce really was.Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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  The Odyssey 4: Christopher Nolan's Odyssey review 21.07.2026 58min

  We've been limbering up for 3 weeks now, readying ourselves to take on Christopher Nolan's Odyssey, the cinematic event of the year (if you don't count Wuthering Heights or the Devil Wears Prada 2). In this episode, Sophie and Jonty weigh in with their acerbic but playful critical take on Nolan's version of Homer's epic, recorded just hours after they watched the film on opposite sides of the world.The positives come first. How does Nolan's interpretation give us a powerful epic for our times? What does Matt Damon show us about Odysseus that's fresh, new and timely? In the second half of the episode SLOB goes darker: what gets lost in this 21st Century remaking of the ultimate homecoming epic? What is fundamental to this incomparable masterpiece that the film doesn't manage to capture? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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  The Odyssey 3: Tennyson's Ulysses 14.07.2026 1h 21min

  Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses” might just be the greatest Odyssey re-write of all time, even though it starts several years after Homer’s mighty epic ends. “Ulysses” is a dramatic monologue in blank verse in which the aging Ulysses prepares to leave Ithaca for one last voyage into the unknown. Its famous last line - to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield - inspired Victorians - and continues to inspire us too. It wasn’t published until later in his writing life, but it was written early on after the unexpected death of his greatest friend, Arthur Hallam. Part of the young Tennyson’s brilliance was the way he reinvented ancient myths and stories to encompass modern ideas as well as his own violently fluctuating mood state. Over the course of his life, he produced a long Arthurian epic, re-popularizing the legends of King Arthur. He also wrote several poems set in the Homeric world of The Odyssey. These include Tiresias - a friend of the show; The Lotus-Eaters and - the subject of this episode - Ulysses.  Here in the SLOB studios we were high-fiving and doing victory laps in celebration of Tennyson’s achievement before we even started recording. We might enjoy this version of the Odyssey more than we’re going to enjoy Matt Damon’s version, though obviously we can’t wait to see it. In short, SLOB stands with Prime Minister Robert Peel, who when he first heard the poem said that he recognized a ‘good speech’ when he heard one and awarded Tennyson a much-needed government pension on the spot. Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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  The Odyssey 2: How the Odyssey conquered the world 07.07.2026 1h 7min

  We’re in another SLoB code red. Only months after Wuthering Heights smashed onto our screens, Christopher Nolan is here for the blockbuster event of the season, taking the one of the oldest and still greatest epics of all time - Homer’s Odyssey - and giving it what it always lacked. That is to say: Matt Damon. And not just Matt Damon, but Zendaya, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Travis Scott, Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron, Lupita Nyong’o, Samantha Morton - and the list goes on. Basically, if you’re an actor and NOT in this film, it’s like discovering you’re the only one in class not invited to a party. If you’re feeling daunted by the scale and import of both this film and the source material - don’t worry. SLoB is here to help you. We’ve donned our scrubs once again. We’ve got our critical defibrillators, suction devices and valve masks and we’re going to deliver you to the cinema ready to take on Homer and Nolan’s Odyssey. We’ve republished the episode we did early in SloB on the Odyssey with Mary Beard. In this episode, we’re going to look at how the Odyssey shaped English literature in a portmanteau episode that will encompass everyone from Shakespeare to Keats, Toni Morrison to Margaret Atwood. In coming episodes, we’re going to take deep dives into Tennyson’s Ulysses and review Nolan’s film. And then, as the dust settles, or the waters meet, we’re going to embark on arguably the greatest Odyssey re-write of all - James Joyce’s Ulysses - in a three part series that will take on each of the works in Joyce’s trilogy of Dubliners, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses itself. Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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  The Odyssey 1: Mary Beard on Homer’s masterpiece 06.07.2026 57min

  To kick-start our series on the Odyssey, we're republishing a hit episode from early SLOB: a conversation with Dame Mary Beard, the world's favorite classicist.The Odyssey - where stories began. Probably written down around 7th century BC - give or take a few centuries either way - by somebody or somebodies who may or may not have been called Homer. Leaving aside these mysteries, what is the Odyssey really about, why is it so violent and why is Odysseus himself - the lord of the lies - such an unlikeable hero? Who better to navigate this intellectual Scylla and historical Charybdis than Mary Beard? Sophie and Jonty listen in admiration as Mary describes discovering The Odyssey aged 14 - a self-proclaimed swot with aspirations to be scruffy and cool (or, in Sophie’s parlance, a ‘dag’). How it - or at least the several incidents in which Odysseus’ wife Penelope is told to shut up and go to her room by her own son - inspired Mary’s best-selling book Women and Power. And how the whole poem, which begins with the word ἄνδρα (man), is a riff on toxic masculinity millennia before Andrew Tate was even in a twinkle in Zeus’ eye. And listen, pithy mortals, to Jonty as he repeatedly mangles Ancient Greek names, particularly the ‘Laestrygonians’, to Sophie as she - not for the first time in this podcast - tries and fails to make a convincing link to The Reformation, and to all of us as we advocate the benefits of an oil rubdown every evening.Further Reading:Emily Wilson, trans, The OdysseyMary Beard books:Women & Power: A Manifesto by Mary Beard (Profile Books, 2019)Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures and Innovations by Mary Beard (Profile Books, 2013) The Parthenon by Mary Beard (Harvard University Press, 2002) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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  The Declaration of Independence at 250 30.06.2026 1h 16min

  It’s been called most influential document ever signed. And it’s been called tokenistic and compromising, a piece of writing written by a committee. The great political economist Jeremy Bentham called it “a "hodge-podge of confusion and absurdity in which the thing to be proved is all along taken for granted.” The Declaration of Independence was drafted by the lawyer, philosopher and statesman Thomas Jefferson, and it made the United States of America an independent nation in 1776, throwing off British colonial rule. Its signing triggered waves of similar declarations around the world. By 1826 more than 20 similar declarations had issued forth from Europe, the Caribbean and Spanish America and hundreds of others would follow. It was not the first declaration of its kind at all, but it would become the most famous. This July, American independence turns 250, and it is under scrutiny all over the world as possibly the most complicated and contradictory exercise in nation-building in human history.Join Sophie and Jonty for a deep dive into this landmark political document, which also became an instant literary classic.Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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  TS Eliot 2: The Waste Land 23.06.2026 1h 20min

  After the triumph of Prufrock and other Observations, TS Eliot almost steered the car into the ditch, poetically and personally. Under the influence of his friend, the fascist poet Ezra Pound - a man who later achieved notoriety for his enthusiastic support of Hitler during the Second World War - Eliot’s second collection of poems reveled in antisemitism, misogyny and willful obscurity. He even wrote poems in French. Pretentious, moi? In this episode, we show how just in the time - with the beret almost on his head - Eliot managed to cast it aside, regain control of the wheel, and steer the vehicle away from the boulevards of Paris into the waste land. As ever, our question is: how?  In the hyperbolic spirit of a Discovery channel documentary, we think it’s fair to say that The Waste Land, published in two magazines in1922, then by Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth press in 1923, changed the world FOREVER. For readers at the time, Eliot captured the spiritual malaise of Europe after the first World War. Nobody could definitively explain the poem - although many had their theories - but it captured more than any realist novel the spirit of the age. It influenced many of the greatest books of the 20th Century, including The Great Gatsby, Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye and many books of poetry. We ourselves are guilty of having written utter bollocks about this poem during our undergraduate years. In consequence of which, we tremble before our microphones for this week’s episode.Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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  TS Eliot 1: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 16.06.2026 1h 11min

  T.S. Eliot was a mid-west American living in London in the first decades of the 20th century, who wrote Dickens-inflected poems about fog, wind, damp evenings and the general gloom of English life (if you were a young, neurotic, over-educated, American male, that is). Eliot’s remembered in the same breath as Ezra Pound as a founding father of literary Modernism, but while very few people could quote a line from Pound, almost everyone will recognize some of these evergreen phrases from Eliot’s lugubrious output. “April is the cruellest month,” “I have measured out my life in coffee spoons,” “do I dare eat a peach?”; “I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled” and “this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.” But thing about Eliot is that he had an ear for a crowd-pleasing line, which is why he also ended up being one of the most important editors of the 20th century at the publishing house Faber and Faber, making the careers of many poets including WH Auden and Marianne Moore.Today you’ll be hearing about Eliot’s penchant for amateur theatricals, Paris, and the philosophy of Henri Bergson; and his pivot from being a high-minded Philosophy PhD student at Harvard to a wanker-banker at Lloyds in London. Next week we’ll focus on his turbulent relationship with the unhappy and unstable Vivienne, his first wife, his complicated feelings about Victorian and Elizabethan literature, and his conversion to high Anglican Christianity, which caused his good pal Viriginia Woolf to announce, “Tom is dead to me.”We claim whenever possible that all literary roads lead to the 1980s and Andrew Lloyd Webber. TS Eliot’s greatest poetic achievement is neither Prufrock nor The Waste Land, but Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, which provided the Cats! Songbook.Genius as Mcavity the Mystery Cat and Rum-Tum Tugger are, TS Eliot’s immortality was truly sealed with the ubiquitous and appalling 80s soft rock ballad “Memory,” sung by Grizabella the once-beautiful feline who has fallen on hard times amid a load of oversized garbage bins. Memory is a mash-up of lines from Eliot’s early poems, and today we’ll find out exactly what it was that so attracted this young American to the burnt out ends of smoky days in early 20C London. Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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  Bleak House by Charles Dickens - SLoB Book Club returns! (feat. Bret Walker SC) 09.06.2026 1h 16min

  SLoB Book Club is back as Sophie and Jonty dive into Charles Dickens’ Bleak House with the help of special guest Bret Walker, SC – one of Australia’s most renowned lawyers.Dickens’ sprawling vision of a nation caught in the fog of corruption, in which human kindness and connection is almost but never quite extinguished, is as relevant today as ever. It contains some of his greatest characters - including the original virtue-signaller Mrs Jellyby, the sinister Mr Krook who collects women’s hair and Inspector Bucket - arguably the first fully-rounded detective in English fiction. It’s a social satire, a murder mystery and a comedy - all tied together by the nefarious Court of Chancery and the interminable case of Jarndyce & Jarndyce. This episode is devoted solely to Chapter 1. Sophie and Jonty look at what Dickens was up to immediately before and during its composition and ask: what exactly is the famous fog drifting over London in the opening lines? In the second half, as the fog curls into the Court of Chancery, we are joined by Bret Walker SC who explains what Chancery is, how it differs from other law courts, why there were real cases like Jarndyce & Jarndyce which lasted many decades, and why Dickens was so incensed by it all. If you want to read along with us over the next four months, then please subscribe – we will release fortnightly episodes from now on.Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcastHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.