Secret Life of Books

In 1969, six years before the Sex Pistols formed and punk broke, a 15 year old boy from Yorkshire called Billy Casper flicked at v-sign at the world. A photograph of that moment became one of the iconic images of late 20th Century Britain, appearing on t-shirts, posters, graffiti, and - of course - a book cover.  Billy Casper wasn't a real boy. He is the anti-hero of Barry Hines’ A Kestrel for a Knave, published in 1968. The book is a masterpiece in its own right, but owes its status in part to the film adaptation made immediately after it came out. Director Ken Loach, working with Hines as scriptwriter, decided to make the film exactly where the book is set - in and around Barnsley, a coal-mining town in Yorkshire. The boy in the poster is, in fact, 15-year-old David Bradley - a local working-class boy without any acting experience, whose father worked in the mines. David Bradley and Billy Caspar are almost inseparable in our imaginations. And so that famous photograph, taken on set, became the image used on the cover of future editions of the book.  A Kestrel for a Knave changed school stories forever. Billy is a semi-literature child living in a state of neglect on a housing estate. His school is a bad secondary modern, where the pupils are physically and psychologically abused by their depressed teachers. What makes Billy’s life worthwhile is his love of the countryside, and the kestrel hawk he has managed to raise and keep in the garden shed.  What Billy wants is to fly his kestrel, but the world keeps getting in the way - his brother, teachers, school bullies, even the Youth Employment Officer. Hence Billy’s iconic v-sign - the ultimate statement of his refusal to participate in anything society has to offer.  Barry Hines, A Kestrel for a KnaveKen Loach, Kes

Published in 1961, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie tells the story of a charismatic and narcissistic teacher in a girl’s private school in Edinburgh during the 1930s. Miss Brodie, who insists repeatedly that she is in the prime of her life - aka middle-aged - cultivates a ‘set’ of impressionable young girls who she can use as proxies to act out her own desires. On at least one occasion, when she encourages an impressionable young girl to fight for the fascists in the Spanish Civil War, this has fatal consequences. In the end, it is one of her own set who ‘betrays’ her to the headmistress Miss Mackay, providing the necessary intel to ensure her sacking. The character of Miss Brodie isn’t the only thing memorable about this book. The prose is - as you would expect from a writer called Spark - electric. That is to say, both poetic and incredibly funny. She also manages to write an avant-garde non-linear account of Brodie’s supposed ‘prime’ that has its own propulsion. The novel darts around over a thirty year time period with an effortlessness and accessibility that even the greatest writers struggle to achieve. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was published first in the New Yorker. It was an immediate hit and reached canonical status when it was adapted into an Oscar winning film in 1969, starring Dame Maggie Smith and directed by Ronald Neame of Poseidon Adventure fame. In this episode, we’re going to find out who betrayed Miss Brodie - and why. We’re also, as ever, going to delve beyond the book into the prime of Muriel Spark herself, uncovering the real Brodies who inspired her, how her earlier career as a biographer helped shape her approach to fiction, and why endings are always just beginnings.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.

Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s School Days (1857) wasn’t the first school fiction novel – that honour goes to a Sarah Fielding, sister of Henry Fielding, who published The Governess, or The Little Female Academy over a hundred years earlier. But, as is so often the case, it’s the man who takes the credit.In this episode, Sophie and Jonty look at how Thomas Hughes’ nostalgic celebration of Rugby School in the 1830s super-charged school fiction as a genre for a century to come. Billy Bunter, Molesworth, St Trinian’s and even Hogwarts owe a large debt to Hughes’ novel.The book tells the story of the eponymous Tom Brown, who goes to Rugby where he excels at rugger and cricket, is bullied by the dastardly Flashman, suffers various torments such as being ‘tossed in a blanket’ and ‘roasted over a fire’, gets the hot for his best friend’s mother and finally discovers evangelical Christianity through the inspiration of his headmaster, Thomas Arnold.Perhaps what is most striking about Tom Brown’s School Days is that it is both familiar - because of the way it continues to influence school fiction today - but deeply, deeply alien. As Thomas Hughes makes clear, the point of England’s so-called public schools in the 19th Century wasn’t to give boys a rounded education but to prepare them for administration of the British Empire. Tom Brown learns a bit of Greek and Latin, but most of all to fight, boss people about, and quote without questioning propaganda about the benefits of colonialism to a subjugated people.Thomas Hughes never quite got over the high-point of his Rugby years, but his enthusiasm makes even the most devout alumnus look half-hearted. In 1880, he founded a Utopian community in Tennessee called… you guessed it… Rugby, complete with croquet court and a ‘university’ named after Rugby’s legendary headmaster Thomas Arnold. Needless to say, the community failed in its intentions, although Rugby, Tennessee still exists.

'Although he was a brave and noble warrior, he did not often slay his own friends while drunk'. In this episode, Sophie and Jonty dive deep into the manosphere - aka Anglo-Saxon England - to look at one of foundational stones of English literature (although you need a bilingual dictionary to read it in the original). Composed sometime around the 8th Century CE, but not written down until much later, Beowulf is a nostalgic evocation of the north Germanic roots of the Anglo-Saxons. It recounts the adventures of the eponymous hero, who sails south from somewhere in modern-day Sweden to make his name by butchering monsters and telling everyone how great he is.In the first adventure, Beowulf defeats a terrible monster called Grendel who is preventing the Danes from enjoying their mead at night. He succeeds - only to provoke the wrath of Grendel's much more fearsome mother. But in the end, she too is no match for our hero. Smash cut to fifty years later and Beowulf embarks on his last adventure to defeat a dragon who is terrorising his own people, the Geats.Sophie and Jonty situate the Anglo-Saxons as a society, dissect Old English poetic forms, share highlights from the poem, make a total dogs dinner of pronouncing Anglo-Saxon names, and speculate what is really going on behind the carnage. They look at the influence of Beowulf in the works of JRR Tolkien, who took the concepts of Middle Earth, dragon lairs and Golem straight out of this poem. They ALSO look at its influence on - surprise reveal - Toni Morrison, who found Grendel's Mother far more interesting than Beowulf himself.Translations:Maria Dahvana Headley (2020) https://bookshop.org/p/books/beowulf-a-new-translation-maria-dahvana-headley/9892043?ean=9780374110031&next=tSeamus Heaney (1999) https://bookshop.org/p/books/beowulf-a-new-verse-translation-seamus-heaney/e6ac56b104eaeed2?ean=9780393320978&next=tJ.R.R. Tolkein (1926) https://bookshop.org/p/books/beowulf-a-translation-and-commentary-christopher-tolkien/030a3c2a0fa27cea?ean=9780544570306&next=tWe also mention Toni Morrison's essay "Grendel and his Mother" in The Source of Self-Regard (2019) and JRR Tolkein's lecture "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" (1936).Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast

To close out our popular series on the great American novelist Toni Morrison, SLOB brings listeners a wonderful discussion with the novelist and Harvard literature Professor Namwali Serpell. Namwali is in the middle of book tour, having just published her highly acclaimed book of essays, "On Morrison," which garnered national and international attention for offering new ways to read and appreciate one of America's most important writers."On Morrison" is based on a class Namwali has been teaching for several years to her undergraduates at Harvard, in which they read many of Morrison's novels over the course of a single semester. In this conversation we talk about why Toni Morrison's novels became instant classics, why it really matters that her writing is often so difficult, what Namwali's experiences teaching Morrison in the classroom shows us about how we can address the reading crisis around the world, and how (as ever) classic literature especially offers us crucial ways forward.Namwali Serpell, "On Morrison."

Beloved, published in 1987, was Toni Morrison’s fifth novel and instantly seen to be an all-time landmark of American literature, winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Sophie and Jonty continue their Morrison series by asking what makes Beloved so original, how the novel sets out to depict Black experience as never before, and - a favourite topics on SLOB – what, really, is the ‘ghost’ that haunts the household in this novel?Beloved was inspired by the true story of the Margaret Garner, a woman who escaped slavery in 1857. On being captured, Garner killed her young daughter to save her from a life of enslavement. At the time the story was a mainstream media sensation, used by abolitionists and pro-slavery voices alike. But in Morrison’s extraordinary retelling it becomes a deep, rich, hard to decipher tale of African-American lives and inner experiences of love, grief, pain and joy from the Middle Passage into the late nineteenth century. Set mostly in 1873, with numerous flashbacks, Beloved tells the stories of the inhabitants of 124 Bluestone Road in Cincinnati, Ohio. A mother, her lover, her daughter, a ghost and a mysterious woman called Beloved who appears in the home of the protagonist Sethe and her daughter Denver. Through the novel we piece together the backstories of the characters and the impact of slavery on their lives. Morrison wrote that one intention in the book was to ‘make the slave experience intimate’. To achieve this she reinvents literary Modernism and African-American autobiography, with a novel that is uncompromising, frequently horrifying, and very beautiful. Readings referred to in this episode:Toni Morrison, "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature."___ "The Site of Memory."Namwali Serpell, On Morrison, Hogarth Press, 2026.Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast

It’s Oscars week!The golden statues will get dished out on Sunday evening in Los Angeles and the world will be watching. Literary classics are big, yet again. Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein and Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet have received multiple nominations, and Jesse Buckley has already won BAFTA and Golden Globe for her performance as Anges, aka Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife. Where do new adaptations and retellings leave the literary originals? Is the rage for reinterpretations revealing that books matter the most, or replacing books with easier, more exciting consumables?For lovers of Hamnet, does Hamlet still matter and if so, why? Does yet another adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, this time starring Jacob Elordi, the glowed-up Darcified Heathcliff of Emereld Fennell’s recent “Wuthering Heights,” give us new insights? Or does Shelley’s masterpiece sink beneath the icy polar seas of the Hollywood publicity machine, even as Elordi’s new version of the monster is unsinkable?Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast

As part of our series on the writing of Toni Morrison we’re lucky enough to record a conversation with one of the world’s leading Toni Morrison scholars, Professor Autumn Womack. Autumn has spent more time with the Morrison Papers at Princeton University than pretty much anyone else – except (maybe) Morrison herself.Autumn describes the experience of coming to Morrison’s writing for the first time in high school, returning to it years later to her as a graduate student and finally getting to teach Morrison's novels at Princeton, where Morrison spent the last years of her writing life. We hear about the fire that nearly destroyed all Morrison's records, and the librarians who saved her papers.Autumn explains why archives are anything but boring – and how some discoveries she and her students made can change the way we read Morrison’s great novels.More about Autumn and her workhttps://english.princeton.edu/people/autumn-womackAn essay Autumn mentions: “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation” (1984)Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slobOr join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast