Secret Life of Books

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

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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)

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.