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Diana Reid is the hottest young screen adaptation-writer of the hour, and she wrote the screenplay for the delightful new Sense and Sensibility film with Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esme Creed-Miles. Today she's joining us on SLOB to talk rom-coms, wild hair, muslins, ribbons, and learning self-restraint. The story of how we got Diana on our show is almost as meet-cute as the story of how she came to write the screenplay. You'll hear the whole story, and we'll go in deep on how Diana went from being a novelist to screenwriter almost overnight, and how Jane Austen herself taught her how to write the beats of a gripping story about two sisters who seem to be opposites and learn how to be more like one another. This version of Sense and Sensibility is true to the original and also windblown and yearningly impassioned, as any good modern rom-com should be. Hear about how Diana, along with the producer, director and actors made the magic happen as a team, over several months of shooting on location in the UK. Diana now lives in London, but grew up in Sydney, and indeed seems to have led a shadow life to Sophie. Diana's first novel, Love and Virtue, is set on the campus of Sydney University, and reminded Sophie not a little of her own heady days as an undergraduate. We talk about how novel-writing prepared Diana for screen-writing, and about how she managed to write three such different, accomplished, page-turning novels and a successful screenplay all before her 30th birthday! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If you're wondering who this Anne Carson person is who just won the Nobel Prize, then SLoB is here to help. In this punchy 20-minute primer, we give you all the vital statistics and some choice extracts from Carson's poetry so you can sparkle and shine when her name comes up - as it surely must - at the weekend dinner table/pub/supermarket queue. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Chapters 36-42 These are crucial pivot chapters, as we watch the book slowly shifting from being a novel about systems, institutions, and the people they betray, to being a pacy thriller about one character who emerges as a seriously bad egg. Lady Deadlock remains tormented by her not-so-secret-secret. Esther uses her disfigured face from smallpox to her advantage in ongoing skirmishes with Mr. Guppy. Even so late in the game, Dickens chucks another minor villain into the mix, with the ghastly Mr. Vholes, and his three amusingly boilerplate daughters, Emma, Jane and Caroline. Meanwhile our pal Richard Carstone is headed toward an act 2 low point. Is there any way he can turn things around? Certainly not with Mr. Skimpole by his side.

Elizabeth Gaskell might be the most underrated novelist of the 19th century. North and South was first published by Charles Dickens in Household Words from 1854-55. But Dickens and Gaskell came to blows over his heavy-handed editing style and misguided ending change. Manchester-based novelist Gaskell fought back against Dickens’ way of telling stories, to make the industrial working classes properly visible for the first time in literary history. She didn’t tell the Establishment what it wanted to hear, and she was considered a nuisance. Even The Leader - a radical newspaper that should have supported her - condemned North and South, saying that a woman could not ‘understand industrial problems’ and therefore had ’no right to add to the confusion by writing about it.’ By the 1950s, Gaskell was regarded as a minor novelist who, according to male critics, lacked the ‘masculinity’ to tackle poverty and social reform. But now, in the 21st Century, she has resumed her rightful place alongside Charles Dickens and George Eliot as one of the greatest Victorian writers. No one else - including Dickens and Eliot - understood what was going on in the great industrial cities better than Gaskell, nor what tactics might be necessary to heal the divisions in British society. All of which is unsurprising when we learn that Gaskell was from a radical dissenting family, and that she spent her adult life in Manchester not just writing novels and raising children, but participating daily in work to address the problems of poverty, hygiene and lack of education in Britain’s fastest growing city. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What do you get when you cross an NSA and CIA analyst with a bestselling horror writer? You get Alma Katsu, who talks to Sophie and Jonty about publishing her new novel Incarnate at the exact moment when the threats and unregulated dangers of A.I become horrifyingly real. In this special bonus episode, we talk about about horror and its contemporary manifestations in fiction and real life. What makes horror such an important and enduring literary form, one that tells urgent stories about our present as well as looking backwards into the literary past? Frankenstein and The Picture of Dorian Gray, two SLOB stalwarts, are major influences on Alma’s Incarnate. It's pretty weird that long before the advent of today’s technology, fears of deep fakes and artificial humans were already keeping novelists up at night. Why our some of our most iconic literary myths about tech that was only imaginary when these classics were first written? And how can Mary Shelley and Oscar Wilde’s visions — especially as they're transformed by Katsu’s brilliant modern horror — help us navigate A.I. with deeper understanding? And there's a gripping few minutes in which Alma reflects on how and why 20 years ago, working in the CIA as an analyst, she and her team “failed to warn” about the threats and imminent dangers of social media. She talks about why that was, and how we might guard against repeated mistakes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Last month we left listeners with the tantalizing question: what happened next in literary history after Chaucer wrote Troilus and Criseyde? This was a serious cliffhanger, and it’s unforgivable that instead of returning the following week with answers, Sophie and Jonty took off on a literary jaunt to the UK. But now we’re back. Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, written sometime around 1602, might be the Bard’s most underrated play. He takes Chacuer’s Troilus and Criseyde story and smashes it together with the Iliad, recently translated into English by George Chapman. Then he adds his own special sauce to hold it all together. Outcome: Shakespeare trashes the two biggest literary movements in 2000 years of European writing, Homeric epic and medieval Courtly Love. In Shakespeare’s telling, Troilus and Cressida’s tryst becomes a random(ish) hook up, while Achilles and Hector - the two great heroes of the Trojan war - are vain and cowardly. The play ends in a series of squalid skirmishes and an overpowering sense that, contrary to what Homer and the courtly poets tell us, there is nothing noble about war. Or, for that matter, love. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Chapters 30-35 Here we are at the center of this vast novel, and Dickens delivers yet more twists and turns. The massive reveal of chapter 29, that Lady Deadlock did not know her daughter was still living, gets back-burnered in these installments. Instead, these chapters are organized around disease and contagion, which spread across the Bleak House universe. A smallpox outbreak breaks in the miserable cottages of the working poor in St Albans, and soon spreads to Bleak House itself. First Jo the sweeper, then Charley and finally Esther fall desperately ill. Dickens explores contagion as a crucial metaphor for understanding the interconnected nature of people, places and events in mid-century Britain. Sophie and Jonty make an excursion into Victorian public health and the development of smallpox vaccines, leading to mass vaccination.

Every aircraft is different. That's why we're asking you to listen to the following romp through some of our favorite flight-scenes in literature. Recorded from Heathrow Terminal 3, and then in the air, shortly after takeoff on QF2 from London to Sydney at the end of SLOB's Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (as Daniel Defoe would say). Many of the least appealing sounds in the world are in this episode, from the clanging of the in-flight kitchen to the sucking of the toilet flush to the announcement of the inevitable chicken or beef for dinner. If you're going to travel vicariously, travel in discomfort. Join Sophie and Jonty down the back of the Airbus A380 for a last hurrah before they claim their baggage and get back to the lush sonic surrounds of the Sydney studios. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sophie and Jonty, coming to you live from London, on the front lines of classic literature. They’re sitting on some steps leading down to the River Thames, right next to the Globe Theatre, on Southbank. True, they stop short of plunging headlong into that mighty stream, as many London writers have done before them. But this is London literature ground zero, the river that Chaucer, Shakespeare, Pepys, Swift, Wordsworth, Dickens, Conrad, Woolf and literally countless others described as the main artery of literary London. Join Sophie and Jonty on a journey through the high and low (tides) of England’s #1 cultural thoroughfare. With thanks to the Ponder & See Foundation for their support. Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slob Or join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

SLOB goes off-script! While in London a couple of weeks ago, Sophie and Jonty got so excited in the Pre-Raphaelite room of Tate Britain that they whipped out their recording equipment and dashed off an impromptu episode. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was the artistic movement of mid-Victorian Britain, a small group of bohemian young men who were convinced that the last decent painting was done back in the fifteenth century, before Raphael came along and spoiled things with his proto-modern realism. So they started painting for the people, about the people, but with quite a lot of ethereal pale women looking uncomfortable. Their pictures have bright, slightly garish colors and a distinctly gothic vibe, but this medieval fantasia is overlaid with close attention to everyday detail - that blew the doublets and hose off London art world. SLOB's eagle eye was arrested by the overlap between the PRB paintings and classic books. Almost all the Pre-Raphaelites hanging at the Tate are riffing on literary history, from Chaucer to Shakespeare, to the Romantic poets, and the Victorian novelists. Find out how literary classics provide the stories, characters and big emotional ideas for what's maybe the most impactful artistic movement in Britain’s history. With thanks to the Ponder & See Foundation for their support. Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slob Or join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Viriginia Woolf hated it and Karl Marx loved it. Woolf starts her iconic A Room of One’s Own by skewering it as a monument to British patriarchy and toxic masculinity. The inevitable sequel to lunching and dining at Oxbridge seemed, unfortunately, to be a visit to the British Museum, she wrote. Friend of the show George Eliot, author of Middlemarch, wholeheartedly agreed, and usually sent her husband to do her research for her, in order to avoid the British Museum's oppressive vibes. These women were describing their allergic reaction to the Reading Room, which is now the British Library building near Kings Cross. But the vast collection of global antiquities, including the Rosetta Stone, the Elgin Marbles and the Sutton Hoo treasure, have always been, like the Reading Room itself, matters of divided opinion, polarizing controversy and simmering international tensions. Is the British Museum a treasure hoard stolen almost entirely from other nations’ riches (Lord Byron thought so)? Or in bringing these objects together, in a self-conscious display of the power and fallibility of human empires, does the British Museum show something truly profound and sobering about the nature of human endeavor (its founder, Hans Sloane, took this view). Almost every London writer had opinions on the matter, and in this episode Sophie and Jonty retrace their steps and visit a handful of the most controversial treasures in the collection. Love it or hate it, the British Museum has catalyzed some of English iiterature’s greatest moments. With thanks to the Ponder & See Foundation for their support. Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slob Or join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We’re picking up the pace with Bleak House. This week we bring you a double-installment: sections 8 and 9 of Dickens’ serialization. The chapters begin in the now familiar landscape of the courts of Chancery, with the cautionary tale of Richard Carstone’s continuing decline into obsession and paralysis. We soon shift to the bracing story of Mr. George, cold-water bather, fitness fanatic, sharpshooter, all around top bloke. Mr. George goes head-to-head with Mr. Tulkinghorn, and comes out ahead in a bravura chapter of goodness outwitting cunning and corruption. Sophie and Jonty detour into a discussion of Victorian fitness culture and the UK’s first public gyms. But the fascinating tales of 19C boxing and “leaping” as national pastimes fade into the Dickensian narrative fog, in the astonishing final chapter, in which Lady Deadlock learns that the daughter she believed had died long ago is living large in Herfordshire. Subscriber heads-up: we sense some impatience among our listeners so we will likely do a few of these double-installments to keep pace, and keep momentum up with the Bleak House Book Club.

This episode was recorded at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, with literary superstar Maggie O'Farrell and one of Britain's leading psychologists, Ben Alderson-Day. On the Secret Life of Books, we talk about classic books and the life and times of the people who wrote them. In this conversation we talk about you - the readers. What happens when we read a book? What is going on our minds? Why can the experience of staring at words on a page be so intense, life-changing even? Is it just a case of impressions and ideas transferring from an author’s words into our imagination, or is there something more mystical, nay uncanny, at work too?  Maggie and Ben reflect on the experience of being readers, and how that can transform being a writer. Maggie is the author of 10 novels, including the acclaimed and recently adapted Hamnet, and her newest book, Land. Ben is a Professor of Psychology at Durham University, author of Presence: The Strange Science of the Unseen Other, and Director of the Readerbank project - a collaborative research project with the Edinburgh Book Festival into how we read, imagine and understand stories.  With thanks to the Ponder & See Foundation for their support. Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slob Or join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

SLOB is in Edinburgh for the International Book Festival. Join us on a walking tour of literary Edinburgh. From Mary Queen of Scots and James VI of Scotland, obsessed with witch hunts and an early anti-tobacco campaigner, to Muriel Spark and slum tourism in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. We walk from the gentrified streets of Marchmont and Bruntsfield, across the Meadows, and into the rough and tumble of the Old Town, a maze of cobbled streets and old buildings crowded on the hillside below the Edinburgh Castle. Cameos from Ian Rankin and Kate Atkinson, William Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, and of course, Sir Walter Scott. Come through Edinburgh with SLOB and relish its very pungent history in a world before modern sanitation. Mr. Johnson and I walked arm-in-arm up the High-street, to my house in James’s court: it was a dusky night: I could not prevent his being assailed by the evening effluvia of Edinburgh. … As we marched slowly along, he grumbled in my ear, ‘I smell you in the dark!’ But he acknowledged that the breadth of the street, and the loftiness of the buildings on each side, made a noble appearance. With thanks to the Ponder & See Foundation for their support. Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slob Or join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week SLOB went full steam ahead from London to Edinburgh, to appear live at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. We love classic books, and we love trains, so what better way to while away the 6 hour slow-train to Edinburgh than to record our second episode about literary railway journeys. Join Sophie and Jonty as they choose sandwiches at Euston Station, board the 12:40 to Scotland via Wigan and Penrith, and talk about their favorite train lit. Savor the authenticity of the train-talk, while wedged in the gangway between the toilets and the trash bin, periodically interrupted by skeptical passengers en route to the snacks carriage. Choo choo!! A fun bonus - just because. Become a subscriber by signing up at Apple: http://apple.co/slob Or join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.