Secret Life of Books

Sophie Gee and Jonty Claypole
  • 4.9 (110)
  • Books
  • Updated Weekly

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 and above all the secret, mysterious meanings of books we thought we knew.-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio: https://patreon.com/SecretLifeofBooks528?utm_medium=unknown&utm_source=join_link&utm_campaign=creatorshare_creator&utm_content=copyLinkinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shorts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

SECRET LIFE OF BOOKS CLUB

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  1. 1d ago

    Factory settings: Elizabeth Gaskell's North & South

    Elizabeth Gaskell might be the most underrated novelist of the 19th century. North and South was first published by Charles Dickens in Household Words from 1854-55. But Dickens and Gaskell came to blows over his heavy-handed editing style and misguided ending change. Manchester-based novelist Gaskell fought back against Dickens’ way of telling stories, to make the industrial working classes properly visible for the first time in literary history. She didn’t tell the Establishment what it wanted to hear, and she was considered a nuisance. Even The Leader - a radical newspaper that should have supported her - condemned North and South, saying that a woman could not ‘understand industrial problems’ and therefore had ’no right to add to the confusion by writing about it.’ By the 1950s, Gaskell was regarded as a minor novelist who, according to male critics, lacked the ‘masculinity’ to tackle poverty and social reform. But now, in the 21st Century, she has resumed her rightful place alongside Charles Dickens and George Eliot as one of the greatest Victorian writers. No one else - including Dickens and Eliot - understood what was going on in the great industrial cities better than Gaskell, nor what tactics might be necessary to heal the divisions in British society. All of which is unsurprising when we learn that Gaskell was from a radical dissenting family, and that she spent her adult life in Manchester not just writing novels and raising children, but participating daily in work to address the problems of poverty, hygiene and lack of education in Britain’s fastest growing city. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Factory settings: Elizabeth Gaskell's North & South

  2. 4d ago

    Gothic horror in the age of AI: Alma Katsu on her new novel Incarnate

    What do you get when you cross an NSA and CIA analyst with a bestselling horror writer? You get Alma Katsu, who talks to Sophie and Jonty about publishing her new novel Incarnate at the exact moment when the threats and unregulated dangers of A.I become horrifyingly real. In this special bonus episode, we talk about about horror and its contemporary manifestations in fiction and real life. What makes horror such an important and enduring literary form, one that tells urgent stories about our present as well as looking backwards into the literary past? Frankenstein and The Picture of Dorian Gray, two SLOB stalwarts, are major influences on Alma’s Incarnate. It's pretty weird that long before the advent of today’s technology, fears of deep fakes and artificial humans were already keeping novelists up at night. Why our some of our most iconic literary myths about tech that was only imaginary when these classics were first written? And how can Mary Shelley and Oscar Wilde’s visions — especially as they're transformed by Katsu’s brilliant modern horror — help us navigate A.I. with deeper understanding? And there's a gripping few minutes in which Alma reflects on how and why 20 years ago, working in the CIA as an analyst, she and her team “failed to warn” about the threats and imminent dangers of social media. She talks about why that was, and how we might guard against repeated mistakes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Gothic horror in the age of AI: Alma Katsu on her new novel Incarnate

  3. Sep 29

    Trashing Up Troy: Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida

    Last month we left listeners with the tantalizing question: what happened next in literary history after Chaucer wrote Troilus and Criseyde? This was a serious cliffhanger, and it’s unforgivable that instead of returning the following week with answers, Sophie and Jonty took off on a literary jaunt to the UK. But now we’re back. Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, written sometime around 1602, might be the Bard’s most underrated play. He takes Chacuer’s Troilus and Criseyde story and smashes it together with the Iliad, recently translated into English by George Chapman. Then he adds his own special sauce to hold it all together. Outcome: Shakespeare trashes the two biggest literary movements in 2000 years of European writing, Homeric epic and medieval Courtly Love. In Shakespeare’s telling, Troilus and Cressida’s tryst becomes a random(ish) hook up, while Achilles and Hector - the two great heroes of the Trojan war - are vain and cowardly. The play ends in a series of squalid skirmishes and an overpowering sense that, contrary to what Homer and the courtly poets tell us, there is nothing noble about war. Or, for that matter, love. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Trashing Up Troy: Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida

  4. Sep 25 • Subscribers Only

    Bleak House Book Club Parts 10 &11

    Chapters 30-35 Here we are at the center of this vast novel, and Dickens delivers yet more twists and turns. The massive reveal of chapter 29, that Lady Deadlock did not know her daughter was still living, gets back-burnered in these installments. Instead, these chapters are organized around disease and contagion, which spread across the Bleak House universe. A smallpox outbreak breaks in the miserable cottages of the working poor in St Albans, and soon spreads to Bleak House itself. First Jo the sweeper, then Charley and finally Esther fall desperately ill. Dickens explores contagion as a crucial metaphor for understanding the interconnected nature of people, places and events in mid-century Britain. Sophie and Jonty make an excursion into Victorian public health and the development of smallpox vaccines, leading to mass vaccination.

  5. Sep 25

    Secret Life of Planes

    Every aircraft is different. That's why we're asking you to listen to the following romp through some of our favorite flight-scenes in literature. Recorded from Heathrow Terminal 3, and then in the air, shortly after takeoff on QF2 from London to Sydney at the end of SLOB's Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (as Daniel Defoe would say). Many of the least appealing sounds in the world are in this episode, from the clanging of the in-flight kitchen to the sucking of the toilet flush to the announcement of the inevitable chicken or beef for dinner. If you're going to travel vicariously, travel in discomfort. Join Sophie and Jonty down the back of the Airbus A380 for a last hurrah before they claim their baggage and get back to the lush sonic surrounds of the Sydney studios. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Secret Life of Planes

  6. Sep 22

    Secret Life of the River Thames

    Sophie and Jonty, coming to you live from London, on the front lines of classic literature. They’re sitting on some steps leading down to the River Thames, right next to the Globe Theatre, on Southbank. True, they stop short of plunging headlong into that mighty stream, as many London writers have done before them. But this is London literature ground zero, the river that Chaucer, Shakespeare, Pepys, Swift, Wordsworth, Dickens, Conrad, Woolf and literally countless others described as the main artery of literary London. Join Sophie and Jonty on a journey through the high and low (tides) of England’s #1 cultural thoroughfare. With thanks to the Ponder & See Foundation for their support. Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slob Or join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Secret Life of the River Thames

  7. Sep 18

    Secret Life of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

    SLOB goes off-script! While in London a couple of weeks ago, Sophie and Jonty got so excited in the Pre-Raphaelite room of Tate Britain that they whipped out their recording equipment and dashed off an impromptu episode. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was the artistic movement of mid-Victorian Britain, a small group of bohemian young men who were convinced that the last decent painting was done back in the fifteenth century, before Raphael came along and spoiled things with his proto-modern realism. So they started painting for the people, about the people, but with quite a lot of ethereal pale women looking uncomfortable. Their pictures have bright, slightly garish colors and a distinctly gothic vibe, but this medieval fantasia is overlaid with close attention to everyday detail - that blew the doublets and hose off London art world. SLOB's eagle eye was arrested by the overlap between the PRB paintings and classic books. Almost all the Pre-Raphaelites hanging at the Tate are riffing on literary history, from Chaucer to Shakespeare, to the Romantic poets, and the Victorian novelists. Find out how literary classics provide the stories, characters and big emotional ideas for what's maybe the most impactful artistic movement in Britain’s history. With thanks to the Ponder & See Foundation for their support. Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slob Or join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Secret Life of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

  8. Sep 15

    Secret Life of the British Museum

    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/slob Or join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Secret Life of the British Museum
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4.9
out of 5
110 Ratings

About

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 and above all the secret, mysterious meanings of books we thought we knew.-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio: https://patreon.com/SecretLifeofBooks528?utm_medium=unknown&utm_source=join_link&utm_campaign=creatorshare_creator&utm_content=copyLinkinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shorts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Information

  • Creator
    Sophie Gee and Jonty Claypole
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    198
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2025 Secret Life of Books
  • Show Website
    Secret Life of Books
  • Provider
    Sophie Gee

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