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Secret Life of Books

Sophie Gee and Jonty Claypole
Secret Life of Books
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  • Smells Like Teen Spirit: The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole
    Martin Amis’ Money, Thomas Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero… These books are often cited as defining works of the 1980s - serious works of literature that captured the spirit of the age. They are all great books, but spare a thought too for Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13¾. Like The Diary of a Nobody, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole is a fictional work, following just over a year in the life of a teenage boy in the city of Leicester in the Midlands of England. Adrian falls in love with a girl at school called Pandora, embarks on a career as a self-proclaimed ‘intellectual’, witnesses his parents’ affairs, separation and eventual reunion, and spends a lot of time examining his spots and measuring the size of his 'thing'. All this happens against the backdrop of Margaret Thatcher’s government, the marriage of Prince Charles and Diana, and the Falklands War. The author Sue Townsend was a comic writer, but she uses her comedy - as all the best satirists do - to explore difficult themes. In her case: poverty, domestic abuse and the disintegration of the Welfare State. This is the last in SLoB's series on male diarists through the centuries (and, yes, there will be a follow-up series soon looking at female diarists). The significance of each diary is that it creates space for a previously unheard voice in British culture (Pepys and the Middle Classes, Boswell and Scottish youth, The Diary of a Nobody and the lower-middle-classes). Adrian Mole's voice is that of an impoverished teenage boy far from the capital. Unlike - say - Oliver Twist - he is not a passive victim, but possesses immense agency. He may not be the first of his type, but he is probably the first to be a best-seller. The Secret Diary sold 2 million copies in its first three years - and, as of date, around 20 million in total. In this episode, Sophie and Jonty discuss how and why this deceptively throwaway book took a nation by storm, why it deserves greater prominence as a serious work of literature, and they even reveal the exact length of Adrian’s ‘thing’ as measured (repeatedly) by himself. Texts mentioned...Mr Bevan's Dream: Why Britain Needs Its Welfare State (1989) by Sue Townsend The Female Eunuch (1970) by Germaine Greer The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979) by Douglas Adams Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Bronte Just William (1922) by Richmal Crompton Sons and Lovers (1913) by DH Lawrence Rivals (1988) by Jilly Cooper TV: Friday Night, Saturday Morning (1979). BBC2. Debate between Malcolm Muggeridge and Monty Python Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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  • The Secret River with Kate Grenville
    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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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  • Keeping Up Appearances with the Pooters: The Diary of A Nobody
    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” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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  • The Secret Life of Summer Holidays: sunburns, family arguments and holiday cottages in classic literature
    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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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  • BONUS: Move Over Bridgerton: James Boswell's Big Romance
    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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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About 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.-- 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=copyLinkinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shorts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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