Oscar Wilde 1: The Happy Prince and Other Stories
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 d...
20 Maj 20251h 15min
BONUS: More 'Rivals': Actor Katherine Parkinson on the joy of Jilly Cooper and playing Lizzie Vereker in the television adaptation
Hot on the heels of our Rivals episode, Sophie and Jonty are joined by the actor and writer Katherine Parkinson - one of the stars of the recent adaptation for television. Katherine talks about playin...
16 Maj 202541min
Bollinger, Board Battles and Bonking Galore: Jilly Cooper's Rivals
Jilly Cooper’s Rivals (1988) is the ultimate bonkbuster - a story of professional rivalry in the Cotswold’s fast-set with lashings of sex thrown in. It follows a wide cast of characters as they jostle...
13 Maj 202558min
The Epic of Gilgamesh with Robert Macfarlane
The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the oldest surviving works of literature - an epic poem from ancient Mesopotamia, stitched together from fragments going back as far as 2100BCE. It tells the story of G...
9 Maj 202550min
The Tortured Poets Department: Emily Dickinson, the Transcendentalists and, yes, Taylor Swift
Emily Dickinson is probably the most famous female poet in the world. And yet – at least according to Dickinson mythology – her work could easily have gone unpublished. She wrote 1800 poems but publis...
6 Maj 20251h 12min
BONUS: Secret Life of Democracy (Literature at the polls)
As Australia heads to the polls, Sophie and Jonty slap their democracy sausages on the bbq and take a tour of the greatest elections and electoral candidates in literary history. Their journey takes t...
2 Maj 202554min
Guns and (war of the) Roses. The irresistible rise of Shakespeare's Richard III
Richard III is one of the OG villains of English literary history, the usurper king who killed his brother, nephews (the infamous “Princes in the Tower”) and seduced his brother's wife all in the spac...
29 Apr 20251h 17min
BONUS: The Disappearance of Agatha Christie
On 3 December 1926, only a few months after the publication of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (in book form), Agatha Christie mysteriously disappeared, leaving an abandoned car in a ditch. As the days pa...
25 Apr 202529min
