SLOB Reads: The Sonnet with Paul Muldoon
For several weeks we've been recording a subscribers-only mini series on the history of the sonnet in English. Sonnets are crowd-pleasers - short, sometimes sweet, and they always deliver a lot of ban...
18 Sep 202538min
The Secret Life of Trains: how rail travel changed fiction - for ever
It was five o’clock on a winter’s morning in Syria. Alongside the platform at Aleppo stood the train grandly designated in railway guides as the Taurus Express. So Agatha Christie began her sleeper [c...
16 Sep 20251h 4min
BONUS: Writing Virginia Woolf's life (with Hermione Lee)
In this final episode in SLoB's series on Virginia Woolf, Jonty talks to literary biographer Hermione Lee whose Virginia Woolf (1996) is perhaps the most respected account of her life and art in a wor...
12 Sep 202543min
Virginia Woolf 5: The Waves
We thought we’d be concluding our Virginia Woolf deep-dive with "A Room of One’s Own," but we’ve enjoyed this series so much we decided to extend. Today we’re looking at the book which many Woolf obse...
9 Sep 202557min
Virginia Woolf 4: A Room Of One's Own
Thank God, my long toil at the women’s lecture is this moment ended. I am back from speaking at Girton, in floods of rain. Starved but valiant young women – that’s my impression.That’s what Virginia W...
1 Sep 20251h 9min
Virginia Woolf 3: Orlando
Virginia Woolf wrote Orlando, a gender-defying historical romance, in 1927, when her intimate friend and lover Vita Sackville-West left London to join her diplomat husband Harold Nicholson in Tehran. ...
26 Aug 20251h 20min
BONUS: Reading Mrs Dalloway (with Alexandra Schwartz)
"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 “...
22 Aug 202529min
Virginia Woolf 2: To The Lighthouse
50 is the new 25!“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 Virigi...
19 Aug 20251h 9min
