Literature's great parties: launch 2025 in style with Lady Macbeth, Count Dracula and the Mad Hatter
To round out 2024, SLoB is hosting the world’s shortest New Year’s Eve party, in which we rank literary history’s most under-the-radar ragers. Crank up your sonos and get ready for classic fun this Ne...
31 Dec 202458min
Did Dickens Change the Face of Christmas Forever? Scrooge, Tiny Tim and the First Ever Turkey
From the “man who invented Christmas,” this is the ultimate Christmas fable. Everyone’s heard of Scrooge, and many could quote his “Bah! Humbug!” And maybe even Tiny Tim’s “God Bless us, every one.” B...
24 Dec 202459min
The Albatross Curse, Bad Weddings and Lots of Opium: Rime of the Ancient Mariner
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner - the name of a classic song by Iron Maiden AND a decent-ish poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It’s the latter that’s under the microscope in this episode. Written in 17...
17 Dec 20241h 12min
Victorian dresses, teenage passions and fiction’s scariest picnic: Picnic at Hanging Rock
Sophie and Jonty find themselves a few sandwiches short of a picnic this week when they take on their first Australian classic book, the legendary “Picnic at Hanging Rock.” This 1960s masterpiece achi...
10 Dec 202457min
Please Sir, may we have some more? Oliver Twist, sex work and criminal underclasses in Victorian London
Let’s Twist Again! Not the dance, of course, but Charles Dickens’ incendiary second novel, which he began writing at the tender age of 24. With Oliver Twist, Dickens found his voice - a style simulta...
3 Dec 20241h 6min
The world's most famous classicist on the world's most famous classic: Mary Beard and The Odyssey
The Odyssey - where stories began. Probably written down around 7th century BC - give or take a few centuries either way - by somebody or somebodies who may or may not have been called Homer. Leaving ...
26 Nov 202457min
Bonus Live Ep: hosts' secrets revealed and the classics stripped bare!
Co-hosts Sophie and Jonty bare all in a bonus SLoB live ep! After months of rummaging through the dirty laundry of the great writers, it is only fair that we turn a critical eye back upon ourselves - ...
22 Nov 202430min
Jane Austen does gothic horror with insta-ready clothes and great interiors: Northanger Abbey
Henry Tilney: is he yet another of Jane Austen’s Bad Men, or the stealth MVP with his interest in dress fabrics and interior decorating? Northanger Abbey is Austen’s funniest, most unabashedly joyful ...
19 Nov 20241h 2min
