Secret Life of Books21 Touko 2024

Alice in Wonderland: rabbit-holes, mad mathematics and the elephant in the room

Alice in Wonderland is one of the most widely translated and quoted books in the world, and yet it is - quite literally - nonsense. How was it ushered into the world and why did it travel quite so far?

Lewis Carroll, or Charles Dodgson to his mum and dad, was born in the north of England in 1832. Somehow, the unique circumstances of his life - a wild imagination, hatred of Victorian morality, appalling board school, love of mathematics and photography, debilitating stutter and a not entirely reassuring interest in children - came together in a children’s story of breathtaking originality.

Join Sophie and Jonty as they get to grips with this unlikely phenomenon, reveal how Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, the speech pathologist James Hunt, Alice Lidell and an extinct bird all played their part in bringing Alice into being, and ask whether his affection for young girls was part of the spirit of the age or something more disturbing.

Recommended reads: Morton N Cohen, Lewis Carroll: A Biography (Knopf, 1995); Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, The Story of Alice (Harvard University Press 2015); Jenny Woolf, The Mystery of Lewis Carroll (Haus Books, 2010)and Jonty Claypole, Words Fail Us Chapter 9 ( Wellcome, 2021); Gillian Beer, Alice in Space: The Sideways World of Lewis Carroll (University of Chicago Press, 2016).

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Designer: Peita Jackson

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Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde

We’re aware that Chaucer’s epic poem Troilus and Criseyde written in the 1380s might be a tough sell to even the most devoted SLoB listener, but bear with us. Troilus and Criseyde is not a novel, but ...

25 Elo 1h 23min

Charlotte Higgins on Ukrainian Lessons: Art in a Time of War

Charlotte Higgins talks to Jonty about her new book, Ukrainian Lessons, which recounts her experiences the last four years reporting on the cultural life of a nation at war. Culture is never far from ...

21 Elo 50min

James Joyce 3: Ulysses

Ulysses is a vast novel - over a quarter of a million words. Yet it follows the action of less than 24 hours. To be fair, Joyce packs a lot into that 24 hours. Although our old friend Stephen Daedalus...

18 Elo 1h 9min

Greek Lessons by Han Kang

This week we take a – somewhat unplanned – detour from our James Joyce sequence, which we put on pause while we finished reading the book! We're taking the chance to include in our series on modern Od...

11 Elo 1h 8min

James Joyce 2: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

One evening in 1898, the 16-year-old James Joyce lost his virginity with a sex worker on a canal bank in Dublin. The event would become the main event in his autobiographical novel A Portrait of the A...

4 Elo 59min

Emily Wilson, the Odyssey and Why Epics Matter

We’ve been saving this one up for a special occasion – a live conversation with Professor Emily Wilson, the celebrated translator of Homer’s Odyssey and the version on which Christopher Nolan’s film i...

3 Elo 34min

A Podcast of One's Own x SLOB: Special Collaboration

For this extra special A Podcast of One’s Own × The Secret Life of Books crossover, former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Sophie Gee sit down to celebrate their shared love of books and r...

29 Heinä 54min

James Joyce 1: Dubliners

Next in our overview of Odysseys, we embark on an epic journey of our own toward the endless tome masterpiece James Joyce’s Ulysses. No reader comes to Joyce without preconceptions. Was he the greates...

28 Heinä 1h 20min