Secret Life of Books – Details, episodes & analysis

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Secret Life of Books

Sophie Gee and Jonty Claypole

Arts

History

Education

Frequency: 1 episode/8d. Total Eps: 180

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=copyLink

insta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/
youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shorts

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Recent rankings

Latest chart positions across Apple Podcasts and Spotify rankings.

Apple Podcasts

🇨🇦 Canada - books
29/08/2026
#29
🇨🇦 Canada - arts
29/08/2026
#89
🇬🇧 Great Britain - books
29/08/2026
#11
🇬🇧 Great Britain - arts
29/08/2026
#36
🇩🇪 Germany - books
29/08/2026
#64
🇺🇸 USA - books
29/08/2026
#75
🇨🇦 Canada - books
28/08/2026
#16
🇨🇦 Canada - arts
28/08/2026
#55
🇬🇧 Great Britain - books
28/08/2026
#14
🇬🇧 Great Britain - arts
28/08/2026
#41

Spotify

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https://www.patreon.com/c/SecretLifeofBookspodcast
33 shares
https://www.patreon.com/c/SecretLifeofBooks528
24 shares
https://patreon.com/SecretLifeofBooks528?utm_medium=unknown&amp
9 shares

https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast
22 shares

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RSS feed quality

Good

Score global : 79%

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Go Tell It On The Mountain: growing up Black, poor and gay in 1930s New York

Season 1 · Episode 15

Tuesday, October 8, 2024 • Duration 52:32

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 follows a fictionalised avatar of his younger self as he navigates his way through an ordinary day in 1930s Harlem. Baldwin showed readers life as he knew it as a black, working-class gay teenager in a racist society.

Baldwin disliked what he called ‘protest’ novels. His interests ranged from classic white writers like Charles Dickens and Henry James to many of the giants of Harlem Renaissance, like Countee Cullen and Richard Wright. He counted Miles Davis and Toni Morrison amongst his friends, but also Norman Mailer and ultimate playboy Hugh Hefner. To write a book about New York, he ultimately needed to leave America - first to Paris, then to a Swiss village, where he - against a backdrop of Alpine hills and the tinkling of cowbells - he brought it to a close.

Go Tell It On the Mountain was respected on publication, but hardly sold like hotcakes. Sophie and Jonty ask why it is that Baldwin, who wrote his greatest works in the 1950s and 1960s, and died in 1987, has become only more relevant in the last decade, with intellectuals, novelists and film-makers adapting or responding to his work.

Content warning: discussion of violence, domestic abuse, racism; mention of rape.

Visit the Secret Life of Books and join a conversation about the episode and the show: https://www.secretlifeofbooks.org/forum

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The Great Gatsby: is this THE great American novel?

Season 1 · Episode 14

Tuesday, October 1, 2024 • Duration 01:10:09

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 and party hard in the aftermath of the First World War. There are love affairs, exotic cocktails (a ‘gin rickey’ anyone?), no less than three car crashes and, of course, the famous party scenes. It has been adapted at least eight times for film and television, yet the road from publication to becoming considered one of Great American Novels was a slow burn. Fitzgerald died believing his life a failure.

The Great Gatsby has some of the most famous final lines in literary history. But what exactly is the ‘green light’ and can the future really be ‘orgastic’ or did Fitzgerald make a typo? Sophie and Jonty wrestle with these questions while asking how a book so specifically rooted in the 1920s has proven so timeless. In the process, Sophie shows off her detailed knowledge of the landscape between Manhattan and Long Island, and Jonty confirms Tom Buchanan’s claim that Jay Gatsby can’t be an Oxford man because ‘he wears a pink suit’.

We also look at Fitzgerald’s life. His determination not to end up a failure like his father (a former salesman at Proctor & Gamble), his turbulent relationship with Zelda Sayre and the long road to Gatsby via a disastrous play called The Vegetable.

Content warning: discusses alcoholism, racism, scenes of violence. And Sophie uses a swear word.

Visit the Secret Life of Books and join a conversation about the episode and the show: https://www.secretlifeofbooks.org/forum

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Gulliver's Travels Part 1

Season 1 · Episode 3

Tuesday, June 4, 2024 • Duration 58:04

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, dirty and brilliantly cutting, written in 1726 by Jonathan Swift, an Anglo-Irish clergyman and perhaps the most notorious writer of his age. Join us to learn more about the fictional adventures of Swift’s creation Lemuel Gulliver, who finds himself in strange, imaginary lands with tiny people and giant people, mad scientists and talking horses.

In the first episode we explain why Swift published Gulliver’s Travels anonymously to avoid being arrested and why this was not the first time Swift had the Prime Minister’s bounty on his head for inflammatory and scandalous writing.

Come for the politics, stay for the sex comedy. Swift has one of the dirtiest minds in English literature. How do Swift’s fantasies play out when the giant women of Brobdignag play with the tiny man-doll Gulliver in their private chamber… And what happens when the giant Gulliver needs to use a toilet in a city full of minute people?

Support the show

Producer: Boyd Britton
Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di Costanzo
Designer: Peita Jackson
Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School.

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Macbeth: terrorism, gunpowder and treason in James I's London

Season 1 · Episode 1

Tuesday, May 28, 2024 • Duration 01:05:35

Macbeth, which actors superstitiously call the Scottish Play, is one of Shakespeare’s shortest and most exciting dramas. It’s also the most horrifying. Join Sophie and Jonty to find out why a play set in 11th-Century Scotland is really about the biggest issues of the day in King James I’s new court in 1606 London. Learn how Shakespeare is taking a major risk using an old tale of kingship to restage the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Find out just how close the Catholic conspirators led by Guido Fawkes came to blowing up the Houses of Parliament and 30,000 people in Stuart London.

During the episode we talk about why it’s a risky choice for Shakespeare to include witches in this play and why “double, double, toil and trouble” is anything but a harmless joke about magic spells and bubbling cauldrons.

This is the play that invents the toxic marriage we later see in Gone Girl and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and we’ll unpack that, along with some famous moments that are deliberately hard to understand - like the dagger Macbeth sees before him, Lady Macbeth’s unwashed hands, and why the forest of Birnam Wood, moves of its own accord. And we’ll settle the age-old question of why Macbeth has trouble sleeping.

Jonty fills us in on how to lift the curse of the Scottish Play if you accidentally say its name, and Sophie gives a 30 second history of the Protestant Reformation. Find out why fans are saying SLOB’s Macbeth in an hour is even better than the real thing!

Shakespeare, Macbeth (New Cambridge Shakespeare, 2019); James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 (Simon and Schuster, 2015); Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespare Became Shakespeare, (Norton, 2004)

Support the show

Producer: Boyd Britton
Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di CostanzoDesigner: Peita JacksonOur thanks to the University of Sydney Business School.

Alice in Wonderland: rabbit-holes, mad mathematics and the elephant in the room

Season 1 · Episode 2

Tuesday, May 21, 2024 • Duration 59:10

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 into the world and why did it travel quite so far?

Lewis Carroll, or Charles Dodgson to his mum and dad, was born in the north of England in 1832. Somehow, the unique circumstances of his life - a wild imagination, hatred of Victorian morality, appalling board school, love of mathematics and photography, debilitating stutter and a not entirely reassuring interest in children - came together in a children’s story of breathtaking originality.

Join Sophie and Jonty as they get to grips with this unlikely phenomenon, reveal how Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, the speech pathologist James Hunt, Alice Lidell and an extinct bird all played their part in bringing Alice into being, and ask whether his affection for young girls was part of the spirit of the age or something more disturbing.

Recommended reads: Morton N Cohen, Lewis Carroll: A Biography (Knopf, 1995); Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, The Story of Alice (Harvard University Press 2015); Jenny Woolf, The Mystery of Lewis Carroll (Haus Books, 2010)and Jonty Claypole, Words Fail Us Chapter 9 ( Wellcome, 2021); Gillian Beer, Alice in Space: The Sideways World of Lewis Carroll (University of Chicago Press, 2016).

Support the show

Producer: Boyd Britton
Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di Costanzo
Designer: Peita Jackson
Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School.

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Secret Life of Books Trailer

Season 1

Tuesday, May 21, 2024 • Duration 00:53

The Secret Life of Books is a fascinating, addictive, often shocking,
occasionally hilarious weekly podcast starring Sophie Gee, professor of
English 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.

Just for example: did you know that Macbeth was a direct response to a
terrorist plot against King James I—and Shakespeare himself was connected
to the plotters? That Charles Dickens almost died in a railway accident in 1865, but
climbed out through a window, rescued his mistress, tended to the sick and
dying—then went back to retrieve the manuscript for Our Mutual Friend? That
Jane Austen observed the parties and balls of Regency England from above:
she towered a full eight inches taller than the average woman of her time?

The Secret Life of Books draws on two lifetimes of readerly expertise, but it’s also deeply user-friendly: you’ll feel like a guest at the best dinner party of the year. These are brilliant people who’ll make you feel brilliant, too.

With the help of some high-profile guests, Sophie and Jonty won’t just transform the classics, they’ll bring to life the great events and movements in world history—wars and revolutions, breakthroughs and triumphs and disasters—seen in the new light of great art rediscovered. This is a podcast for readers and book groups, students and teachers of literature, but it’s also for fans of history and biography, and anyone who’s excited by dazzling, deeply knowledgeable minds working hard and having the time of their lives.

Support the show

Producer: Boyd Britton
Digital Content Coordinator: Olivia di Costanzo
Designer: Peita Jackson
Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School.

To Kill a Mockingbird: racism, gun violence and coming of age in the 1930s South

Season 1 · Episode 13

Tuesday, September 24, 2024 • Duration 52:05

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 and children alike. What was it about this book that captured the public imagination at the time - and to this day?

Harper Lee mined her own childhood in Alabama for this coming-of-age story of personal and social justice against a backdrop of Depression-era America. She worked and reworked several earlier drafts before achieving the crystal precision of what would prove her masterpiece. Harper imagined the book would be just the first in an illustrious career; that she would fulfil her dream of becoming, in her own words, ‘the Jane Austen of South Alabama’. But she never wrote another novel.

Sophie and Jonty argue that the success of To Kill A Mockingbird rested on the way it optimistically presented a path of reconciliation through what was, at the time, a subject of deep national division - segregation and civil rights. Harper’s Mockingbird, like Martin Luther King’s famous dream, contained a message of hope. But was it a realistic one?

At the very end of her life, and in controversial circumstances, an earlier draft of what became To Kill A Mockingbird was published. Titled Go Set A Watchman, this book presented a more pessimistic view of American society. It’s less convincing as a work of art, but - in many ways - a more truthful one.

Content warning: discusses gun violence, racism, domestic and sexual violence.

Visit the Secret Life of Books and join a conversation about the episode and the show: https://www.secretlifeofbooks.org/forum

Secret Life of Books – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

RSS feed quality and score

Publication history

Latest published episodes

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Secret Life of Books – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

Patreon3

Instagram1

RSS feed quality and score

Publication history

Latest published episodes

Similar podcasts and content

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Patreon3

Instagram1

Youtube1

Apple Podcasts

Spotify