Secret Life of Books

This special episode on a great modern classic was recorded live at the Sydney Writers' Festival in 2025. Very few novels can genuinely claim to have changed a nation’s consciousness. The Secret River, written by Kate Grenville and published in 2005, is one of those books. It put a spotlight on a side of white settler experience that Australians had been brought up to ignore - the violence, murders and genocide. By questioning her ancestors, Kate Grenville encouraged thousands of Australians with British ancestry to do likewise. Many of us have done so as a consequence of this book, wondering if those heroic pioneers we heard about at a grandparent’s knee were really quite as heroic as all that.Kate Grenville, The Secret River, The Leiutenant, Sarah Thornhill.Kate Grenville, Searching for the Secret River, Unsettled.

This episode is a cheat. It's not a real published personal diary, but a satire on published diaries. It’s a fiction, but it’s a fiction that tells us a lot about fact. Published 1892, The Diary of a Nobody is about London clerk, Charles Pooter, his wife Carrie, his son William Lupin, and numerous friends and acquaintances. Most of all, it's about upwardly mobile lower middle class life in London at around the time of Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker and Robert Louis Stevenson. But the Grossmiths showed a side of life and a kind of comedy those other writers wouldn't touch. That's what made Diary of a Nobody a huge bestseller.The Grossmith brothers were cultural barometers of their day. George Grossmith was the most famous character actor in Gilbert and Sullivan's operettas, and a stand-up comic, sketch writer, performer and artist. He wrote hit 18 comic opera, 600 songs, and endless short sketches. Weedon Grossmith (where is that name now?) was also a successful artist, writer, performer and actor.In this episode we'll see a side of Victorian London we haven't delved into until now. Sophie and Jonty feel their oats as upwardly mobile creatives, or Upper Middle Bogans as we're called in Australia. And if anyone listening thinks that SLOB has turned SNOB, that's because The Diary of a Nobody was an unprecedentedly playful and loving look at the domestic anxieties, commuter travel, office politics and food and drink of a highly specific slice of class society in Victorian Britain.This episode reveals what isn’t being talked about in the great books of the period. Sophie and Jonty ask why the Grossmith Brothers used the diary form to write their satire, and how this book in the inheritor of Samuel Pepys and James Boswell's voices. We'll learn how this diary shows the faultlines, tensions and unresolved issues about Victorian masculinity, making Diary of a Nobody a mini masterpiece.Books mentioned in this episode:George and Weedon Grossmith, Diary of a Nobody.Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest; The Picture of Dorian GrayEvelyn Waugh, Decline and FallHG Wells, The History of Mr. Polly, Love and Mr. LewishamGeorge Gissing, New Grub StreetBill Watterman, Calvin and HobbesJim Davis, GarfieldJohn Gay, The Beggar’s OperaGeorge Orwell, Keep the Aspisistra FlyingHerman Melville, Bartlby the ScrivenerWilkie Collins, The MoonstoneE.M. Forster, Howards EndHanif Kureshi, The Buddha of SuburbiaVirginia Woolf, “Mrs. Bennet and Mr. Brown”

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Not if it was the summer holiday that Jonty's family went on to Menorca when a stomach bug ripped through their local village. Or the ill-fated beachside retreat amid a lacerating tropical storm that Sophie took with her mother and sister to mourn her father's death.Classic literature stages endless scenes of summer holidays, some successful and delightful, others, erm, less so. In this joyful episode to celebrate the northern hemisphere summer, Sophie and Jonty travel from the idyllic to the catastrophic by way of a varied and surprising collections of classics taken from many time periods. As they journey through summer suns, winds and rains, they begin to realize just how many writers have used hot weather and family holidays to depict the rich complexities of the human heart and the transformations their characters must undergo in the course of literary narrative.

A bonus episode to share the extraordinary detail and richness of the real-time, live-streamed account James Boswell gives us of his first love affair in 1760s London. This may be the closest we can ever come to understanding what passion was like in an age of sexual libertinism and STDs before antibiotics. In our last episode, we talked about Boswell’s long-lost London journal of 1762-63, finally published in 1951. We talked briefly about Boswell’s fling with an actor called Louisa. In this bonus episode, we want to do full justice to that story because it is an astonishing document. We are all familiar with the way that story-tellers - from Jane Austen to Bridgerton - depict 18th century seduction scenes, but Boswell gives us the real thing, transcribing dialogue as and when it happened.

It’s London, 1763 - we're paying a visit to the most fashionable, literary, sexy, filthy, glamorous capital in the world. The 22 year old James Boswell, born and raised on a large country estate outside Edinburgh, has escaped his ambitious and pushy Presbyterian parents and arrived in London. They want him to follow the family footsteps and become a lawyer. He wants a commission in the guards - which means that he wants to loaf around London in peacetime wearing a smart uniform and getting paid. But more than that, he wants to make a splash – to leave his mark among the great writers and artists of his day. Boswell will go on to write the "Life of Samuel Johnson," maybe the greatest biography ever written, and the founding text in modern biography. But in 1762 he’s having trouble getting a start on his career. When this journal was discovered hidden away in a house in Aberdeen in the 20th century, the full extent of Boswell’s literary genius was finally understood. The "London Journal" was published to instant notoriety and celebrity, because of Boswell’s tell-all sexual adventures and total frankness about his efforts to make a mark on literature, and his own life.We see Boswell in company with the most celebrated artists and writers of the day, and we hear about his adventures with his most treasured possession – a reuseable eighteenth-century condom, fabricated from sheeps' intestines. Content warning: this episode includes scenes of sexual violence. Books referred to in this episode:James Boswell, London JournalJames Boswell, Life of Samuel JohnsonJames Boswell and Samuel Johnson, Journal of a Tour to the HebridesSamuel Johnson, Johnson’s DictionarySamuel Johnson, RasselasSamuel Johnson, Lives of the PoetsLaurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram ShandyDavid Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human UnderstandingJohn Hunter, A Treatise of Venereal DiseaseAdam Smith, The Wealth of NationsJoseph Addison and Richard Steele, the Tatler and The Spectator-- 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 and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social

Welcome to London in the swinging sixties. One man fights off a towering inferno, navigates a zombie apocalypse, and an invading fleet of evil foreigners, while doing an extraordinary amount of shagging along the way. But we’re not talking about Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. This is the Diary of Samuel Pepys, written in the - flip that 9 upside down - 1660s of Restoration Britain.  Pepys’ contribution to history, literature and the modern soul is second to none, but it was his reforms to the navy that made him a big cheese in his day. And, speaking of cheese, this is a man who loves his parmesan - as we’ll be discovering. Without very little precedence to draw upon, Pepys - a nobody at the time - sat down on 1 January 1660 and spilled his soul and most intimate secrets onto the page in a way nobody had done before. He kept it up for the next ten years, giving us a front row seat at the frivolous court of King Charles II, the Great Fire of London, the horrific plague of 1665, and the bosoms of many unfortunate women who willingly or otherwise faced his advances. Join us for the the first episode in a series about personal diaries from the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s and 1900s. Books mentioned in this episode:Samuel Pepys, Diary of Samuel PepysJohn Evelyn, The Diary of John EvelynJoseph Addison and Richard Steele, the SpectatorClaire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled SelfSophie Gee, Making Waste: Leftovers and the Literary Imagination -- 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 and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day -- especially for Jane Austen. On and off the page, Austen paid a lot of attention to the breakfast table. In real life, Austen woke before her family, played the piano and got the breakfast ready, before retreating to write for the rest of the morning. And in the novels this meal is no less foundational: it's when we get to see the characters as they really are, sometimes up and about for hours before downing a boiled egg and a piece of toast, barely managing to consume a thin piece of bread and butter, or shoveling up pork, eggs and coffee after a morning's ride. Breakfast is the least formal meal of the day, so we see lots of interactions that can't happen at dinner, lunch or supper, when servants are present. At all times, Austen pays meticulous attention to what gets eaten, how, and why, and of course what is revealed about all of her characters when they sit down to table.Join us for a joyful romp through Austen's meals, in a studio recording of a session Sophie and Jonty presented at the Sorrento Writers Festival in April 2025, with the world-renowned Austen scholar Clara Tuite, whose "Thirty Great Myths About Jane Austen", co-authored with Sophie's Princeton colleague Claudia Johnson, is a must-read for any Janeite.

In this episode - the last in our series on Oscar Wilde - we tell the story of the melodramatic, mediagenic, mad, melancholy end of Oscar Wilde's writing life and glittering career as the cleverest man in Britain, after his string of smash hit plays, culminating in "The Importance of Being Earnest." Almost as the curtain went up on his masterpiece he filed a libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of Alfred Douglass, Wilde's lover. It was the beginning of a series of legal, emotional and financial disasters for Oscar Wilde, and led to the last of his great works: The Ballad of Reading Gaol. In previous episodes we looked at Wilde's break-out collection of fairy tales (the Happy Prince), a novel (Dorian Gray) and his greatest play. With The Ballad of Reading Gaol Wilde's career culminated, and ended, with a long poem. It tells the story of Charles Thomas Wooldridge, a trooper in the Royal Horse Guards, who murdered his girlfriend and was executed at Reading Gaol, where Wilde was also incarcerated, in July 1896. With "Reading Goal," Wilde's most distinctive literary device, the paradox, stops being a force of subversive delight, and becomes a grim, philosophical reflection on the impossibility of happiness. The poem was published in 1898 under the name C33, which was Wilde’s prison name. It seemed to herald a new beginning for Wilde - the work of a reflective, penitent and compassionate artist - but it was actually his swan song. He was unable to write anything else before his death at the age of 46 in 1900.Works referred to in this episode:Oscar Wilde, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” (1898) De profundis (pub. 1905)John Betjeman, The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel (1937)John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678)Anon. Newgate Calendar, or The Malefactors' Bloody Register, (1774)Susan Fletcher, Twelve Months in an English Prison, (1883)Marcus Clark, For the Term of His Natural Life, (1872)Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798)William Wordsworth, the “Lucy” poems (1798-1801)Ballads by Keats, Byron and the Border poets (18C)John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695)John Milton, De doctrina christiana (written 17C, pub 1825) and the Divorce Tracts (1643-45)William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, Sexual Inversion (1896)Edward Carpenter, “Civilization, Its Cause and Cure” and other essays (1889)D.H. Lawrence Lady Chatterley’s Lover, (1828)E.M. Forster Maurice, (written 1913-14, pub. 1972)Charlotte Wilson and Peter Kropotkin, Freedom Magazine (founded 1886)-- 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 and get bonus content: patreon.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast-- Follow us on our socials:youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shortsinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social

Published in 2018, Lisa Genova’s Every Note Played follows the experiences of renowned concert pianist Richard Evans from the moment he is diagnosed with a form of Motor Neurone Disease, or MND, to his death less than two years later. It is a confronting, blow-by-blow account of the physical deterioration caused by MND, but also a testament to humanity’s capacity for empathy, love and redemption. In this special episode, recorded in support of MotorOn (which raises funding for MND research), Jonty talks to Professor Dominic Rowe - director of the Macquarie University Centre for MND and one of the world’s leading experts in MND. When Every Note Played begins, Richard is recently divorced from his wife Karina, but neither have been able to move on from their anger and endless emotional ruminating. But when Richard is diagnosed, Karina becomes his primary carer. Over the last months of his life, they learn to forgive one another and move on - one towards death, the other towards creative rebirth. Every Note Played is the fifth novel by Lisa Genova, who made her debut with the bestselling Still Alice in 2007. Still Alice was adapted into a film, with Julianne Moore giving an Oscar winning performance in the title role as the 50 year old Alice who develops onset dementia. Richard Glatzer directed the film while suffering from advanced MND - and he died a few months after release. Inspired by Glatzer, and their friendship, Genova wrote Every Note Played.Content warning: this episode is a frank conversation about a subject some may find disturbing.For more information about MND, please go to: Macquarie Centre for MND Research - www.mndnsw.org.au - the site has links to info lines and information packs If you are interested in donating to MotorOn and supporting the work of the Macqueries Centre for MND Research, please go to www.motoron.org