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Secret Life of Books — Arts
Secret Life of Books

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.

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Copyright: © 2025 Secret Life of Books

Latest Episodes:

Macbeth: terrorism, gunpowder and treason in James I's London May 28, 2024

Show notes

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 Costanzo

Designer: Peita Jackson

Our thanks to the University of Sydney Business School.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alice in Wonderland: rabbit-holes, mad mathematics and the elephant in the room May 21, 2024

Show notes

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.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Secret Life of Books Trailer May 21, 2024

Show notes

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.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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