Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
"Throw that party. Go for it. It's worth it."
In today’s Mrs. Dalloway special episode, Sophie talks to Alex Schwartz, writer, critic and co-host of the New Yorker Magazine’s Critics at Large pod. On “Critics at Large’ she discusses the most urgent cultural matters, ranging from Sesame Street to the Pope to Meaghan and Harry to Ancient Rome. Which is why we knew we needed Alex on the show.
It started when Sophie heard Alex discussing Jane Austen with a playful rigor that rarely comes with Austen-itis. Something made her think Alex would have great things to say about Mrs. Dalloway. And guess what? Woolf is Alex’s favourite writer. Hear what a critic at large thinks about dresses, flowers, being young and in love, and why it’s always worth throwing the party, and reading the classics.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
“To the Lighthouse” is Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece about summer holidays and the passage of time. It’s perhaps the greatest novel ever written about middle-age, published when Viriginia Woolf herself was middle aged, and recorded by Sophie and Jonty at the height of their middle aged powers.
50 is the new 25!
The novel was published in 1927, after “Mrs. Dalloway” and the “Common Reader” in 1925. It was an instant hit, sold twice as much as Mrs. Dalloway before publication and was immediately declared Woolf’s masterpiece, admitted by Woolf’s husband Leonard. Woolf herself wasn’t sure about some bits of it, but knew she’d nailed the dinner party scene at the novel’s centre, where the wonderful Mrs. Ramsay serves her guests a boeuf en daube for 14.
Join Sophie and Jonty as they continue the story of Virginia Woolf’s extraordinary life and times, told through the details of how she came to write her greatest books. This week we trace her childhood, her summer holidays in Cornwall, her extraordinary, famous, demanding parents, and the beginnings of Woolf’s long struggle with mental illness. And of course we take plenty of detours into holiday cooking and … you guessed it, particle physics.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
‘Think of a book as a very dangerous and exciting game, which it takes two to play at.’
For Virginia Woolf, reading wasn’t a passive act. It requires guts and ingenuity. At times one is locked in combat with a book, at others one is the ‘accomplice’ of a writer, like an accomplice to crime, aiding an act of daring imagination. Few people read as closely, as critically and joyfully as Virginia Woolf. For her, books were real relationships – and she famously dedicated Orlando to some of her favourite historical writers as well as her friends.
To talk about Woolf as a reader, Jonty is joined by author and scholar Alexandra Harris. Alexandra is author of the acclaimed Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper, Weatherland, The Rising Down and a study of Virginia Woolf. She is currently writing a book all about Virginia Woolf’s life as a reader.
Together, Alexandra and Jonty talk about Virginia Woolf’s unique philosophy of reading and discuss some of her favourite books.
Further reading:
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Not the Secret Life of Books, as we joyfully immerse ourselves in four of Woolf's greatest books to celebrate what is probably the most extraordinary middle-aged flowering of literary talent in history. Virginia Woolf was 43 when she published Mrs. Dalloway, 100 years ago in 1925. She went on to publish To the Lighthouse, Orlando and a Room of One's Own, to name only a few of her extraordinary achievements.
To celebrate Mrs. Dalloway's centenary, Virginia Woolf's middle-aged burst of creative brilliance, and to tell the story of the other members of the Bloomsbury circle around her, we take a deep dive into Woolf and her work. Virginia Stephen was born in Victorian England to a famously literary and artistic family: both parents were fixtures in high end London intellectual society. But her childhood was turbulent as much it was illuminated by brilliance all around her. The young Virginia Stephen and her sister Vanessa were sexually and emotionally abused as children and young teenagers, and these early experiences contributed to Woolf's battle with mental illness, probably bipolar disorder. But her life was also filled with joy, including the joy of her marriage to Leonard Woolf and her love affair with Vita Sackville-West.
One of many wonderful things about Woolf is that although she died relatively young she left a huge amount of writing behind her. 9 novels, 25 years of diaries, letters, lectures, essays and journalism. Join us for an extraordinary 20thC story of literary glamor and dazzling success, alongside terrible grief, suffering and trauma. We’ll meet many of the biggest names in Modernism, we’ll encounter some of the century’s most horrifying events, and one of fiction's greatest parties.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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.
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.
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 Gray
Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall
HG Wells, The History of Mr. Polly, Love and Mr. Lewisham
George Gissing, New Grub Street
Bill Watterman, Calvin and Hobbes
Jim Davis, Garfield
John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera
George Orwell, Keep the Aspisistra Flying
Herman Melville, Bartlby the Scrivener
Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone
E.M. Forster, Howards End
Hanif Kureshi, The Buddha of Suburbia
Virginia Woolf, “Mrs. Bennet and Mr. Brown”
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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.
Books referred to in this episode:
James Boswell, London Journal
James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson
James Boswell and Samuel Johnson, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides
Samuel Johnson, Johnson’s Dictionary
Samuel Johnson, Rasselas
Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Poets
Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
John Hunter, A Treatise of Venereal Disease
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
Joseph 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/shorts
insta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/
bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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 Pepys
John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn
Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, the Spectator
Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self
Sophie 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/shorts
insta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/
bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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/shorts
insta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/
bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
The Importance of Being Earnest, first performed in 1895 at the sumptuous St James' Theatre in London, was Wilde’s last, and without question his greatest piece of dramatic writing. The handbag, the cucumber sandwiches, the Bunburying and the first class ticket to Worthing all come together to create a timeless classic that has been rarely out of performance since its debut.
It was a smash-hit from the moment it opened, but even as the lights went up, Wilde was grabbing the spotlight in the press and the courts with his libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of Wilde's young gay lover Bosie.
None of this is apparent on first viewing "Earnest," which seemingly refuses to be serious. It's a farce and a romance and a fairy tale -- but it's also a radical confession of homosexual attraction and a bitter satire on Victorian morality and domestic politics. It’s also a parody of Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta Patience which was itself a parody of Oscar Wilde and the aesthetic movement in England.
Content warning to listeners: reading this play – and possibly just listening to this episode - will cause you to irritate your family members by attempting aphoristic remarks and epigrammatic witticisms.
Books and writers mentioned in this episode:
Oscar Wilde: A LIfe (2021) by Matthew Sturgis
Sodomy on the Thames: Sex, Love and Scandal in Wilde Times (2012) by Morris B Kaplan
Oscar Wilde, Vera, or, The Nihilists; Salome; The Importance of Being Earnest; Lady Windermere's Fan; A Woman of No Importance; The Ideal Husband.
Oscar Wilde, "The Portrait of Mr. W.H."; "The Decay of Lying"; "The Soul of Man Under Socialism"; "The Critic as Artist"
Bram Stoker, Dracula
Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream; Much Ado About Nothing
Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The School for Scandal; The Rivals
Oliver Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer
Henry Arthur Jones, The Silver King; Saints and Sinners
Arthur Wing Pinero, The Second Mrs. Tanqueray
Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Emile Zola
Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler; The Doll's House
George Bernard Shaw, The Philanderer, Mrs. Warren's Profession, Pygmalion
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
-- 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/shorts
insta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/
bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Gretchen Rubin is one of America’s best known and best-loved writers on how to be happy. She published her evergreen classic The Happiness Project in 2009, and it was an instant hit. She’s followed it with many more books on the habits of happiness, and she’s also co-host of a hit podcast Happier, which she hosts with her sister, the writer Elizabeth Craft.
Today we’re talking about Gretchen’s take on Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde’s only novel, which is packed with sometimes brilliant and sometimes merely glib aphorisms and witticisms. We talk about why pithy sayings are so appealing, whether they are ever really true, and why Wilde was so obsessed with this kind of writing. A companion episode to episode 63 on the book itself.
Mentioned on this episode:
Gretchen Rubin: The Happiness Project, Life in Five Senses, Happier and Home and Secrets of Adulthood.
Gretchen Rubin and Elizabeth Craft: Happier the podcast.
Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray.
-- 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/shorts
insta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/
bluesky: @slobpodcast.bsky.social
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
The Picture of Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde’s only novel, and it caused a sensation. It was used as evidence in Wilde’s trial for the crime of “gross indecency” in 1895. The conceit of the story is famous – a portrait grows old and corrupt while its human subject remains eternally youthful. But who knows what really happens in this famous modern myth?
Sophie and Jonty talk about the influence of Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Jonty throws around some exciting legal phrases like the Criminal Law Amendment Act. There’s plenty of discussion of Wilde’s personal obsession with home interiors, as well as a debate about why Wilde is so indebted to Dickens when he’s always going on about his contempt for matters of morality. Find out how a novel that is quintessentially about London is also about Wilde’s Irish identity, and what kind of wallpaper Oscar Wilde had in his student digs at Oxford. As the arch-aphorist and aesthetic rogue Henry Wotton would say, this podcast episode “has all the surprise of candour,” so find out what really happens in this legendary modern myth.
Books referenced or mentioned in this episode:
Oscar Wilde: A LIfe (2021) by Matthew Sturgis
Sodomy on the Thames: Sex, Love and Scandal in Wilde Times (2012) by Morris B Kaplan
Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888)
Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” and “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” (1889)
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (1838)
Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864); Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870); Around the World in Eighty Days (1872)
Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)
Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)
H.G. Wells The Time Machine (1895) War of the Worlds (1898)
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Jill Lepore is one of America’s most renowned intellectuals. She’s Professor not only of American History, but also of Law at Harvard University; she's a staff writer at the New Yorker, and still finds time to write some of the most renowned history books of the 21st Century, including the magisterial and monumental These Truths: A History of the United States, the brilliant Secret History of Wonder Woman and Sophie’s personal favourite, a history of King Phillip’s War and the origins of American identity.
For the first 100 days of the new US presidency, Jill Lepore turned to the classics-- the Penguin Little Black Classics to be exact. In these miniature volumes of great writing, Jill found the imaginative intelligence, resilience and sense of ordinary pleasures she needed to abide with what's going on across America -- and at Harvard specifically -- as a result of Trump's turbulent regime. Listen and learn how the classics reconnect us with deep truths that we might "hold to be self-evident," but which have so often been under threat across human history.
Books mentioned in this episode and published in Penguin Little Black Classics:
The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio (~1350)
"As Kingfishers Catch Fire," Gerard Manley Hopkins (1877)
Anon. The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue (late 13C)
Wailing Ghosts, Pu Songling (c.1640)
"A Modest Proposal," Jonathan Swift (1727)
Tang Dynasty Poets (c8C)
"On the Beach at Night Alone," Walt Whitman (1856)
A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees, Kenko (13C)
"The Eve of St Agnes," John Keats (1819)
"Travels in the Land of Serpents and Pearls," Marco Polo (c1300)
"Caligula," Suetonius (121 CE)
"Olalla," Robert Louis Stevenson (1885)
The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848)
"Trimalchio's Feast", Petronius (c.60 CE)
Inferno, Dante (14C)
"The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale," Geoffrey Chaucer (c1390)
Essais, Michel de Montaigne (1580)
"The Beautifull Cassandra," Jane Austen (1788)
Homer, The Iliad and The Odyssey
"The Maldive Shark," Herman Melville (1888)
Socrates’ Defence, Plato (399 BCE)
"Goblin Market," Christina Rossetti (1862)
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Few writers have blurred the boundaries between life and art quite so spectacularly as Oscar Wilde. In his writing, he challenged the moral standards of the time, advocated for Irish Nationalism and demanded tolerance of homosexuality. He wrote about decadence and the corruption of youth before going out in a fireball of scandal of his own making, his reputation shattered in the infamous trial that followed.
So, was Oscar Wilde the great genius of his day or just a rather talented man with a knack for publicity? Was he a martyr in the history of gay activism, or just a self-absorbed pain in the arse? These are just some of the questions Sophie and Jonty are asking in the first of a four part series on Oscar Wilde.
In this first episode, they look at his early years and how cultural and political movements of the time shaped his first great work - the seemingly timeless fairy-tales of The Happy Prince and Other Stories. Into these stories, Wilde condensed years of scholarship, literary criticism and the development of a personal aesthetic and philosophy. It is a short book and deceptively simple because these stories - like all the best fairytales - conceal deeper truths about human experience. Most importantly, through them Wilde found his voice as a writer, unleashing the extraordinary creative outpouring of the following ten years.
Texts referred to:
Oscar: A Life (2018) by Matthew Sturgis
Alice in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll
Children’s and Household Tales (1812) by the Brothers Grimm
Doctor Faustus (c.1594) Christopher Marlowe
Patience (1881) by Gilbert and Sullivan (extract from 1961 recording with John Reed)
Study of the Greek Poets (1873) by JA Symonds
Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) by Walter Pater
Social Life in Greece (1874) by John Pentland Mahaffy
David Copperfield (1850) by Charles Dickens
A Christmas Carol (1843) by Charles Dickens
Hard Times (1854) by Charles Dickens
Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
