Secret Life of Books14 Loka 2025

Montaigne pt1: Climb Every Montaigne (with Stephen Greenblatt)

Sophie talks to one of the world's leading literary scholars, who co-founded a whole branch of literary studies known as "The New Historicism," before reinventing Shakespeare for new generations of readers, and then turning the Roman poet Lucretius into an (almost) household name. Stephen Greenblatt is professor of English at Harvard University, he's a Pulitzer Prize winner and the author of Will in the World, The Swerve, and a host of other acclaimed and brilliant books. Most recently he's the author of Dark Renaissance, the story of Shakespeare's rival and shadow double, Christopher Marlowe.

But today he talks about the writer he turns to whenever he thinks about what makes the Renaissance so distinct a period -- the age in which Europeans truly became modern. That writer is the great French essayist Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne is a stealth heavy-hitter, an MVP of classic literature who is now all too rarely read. To explain what makes Montaigne's influence and legacy so important, and why he's truly one of the GOATs, Sophie and Jonty have decided to bring you two companion conversations with a pair of very different scholars.

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Secret Life of Edinburgh

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 ant...

1 Syys 59min

Secret Life of Trains 2 (Choo choo!)

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 ...

31 Elo 37min

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