Best Jonty Claypole Podcasts (2025)

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SLOB Reads: The Sonnet with Paul Muldoon 38:24

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20m ago38:24

38:24

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 bang for the reading buck. Today, one of the world's great living poets, Paul Muldoon, Pulitzer Prize winner and former poetry editor of the New Yorker, …

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The Secret Life of Trains: how rail travel changed fiction - for ever 1:04:19

14h ago1:04:19

1:04:19

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 [car] hit, Murder on the Orient Express (1934). All aboard! In the latest of SLoB's much-loved special episodes on surprising, fun, and always deeply re…

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BONUS: Writing Virginia Woolf's life (with Hermione Lee) 43:40

4d ago43:40

43:40

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 world not short on them. Hermione talks about the challenges in writing about somebody who had such firm views on what a biography should and shouldn't b…

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Virginia Woolf 5: The Waves 57:11

7d ago57:11

57:11

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 obsessives consider her masterpiece. Woolf published The Waves in 1931, just two years after her string of masterpieces, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, …

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Virginia Woolf 4: A Room Of One's Own 1:09:41

7d ago1:09:41

1:09:41

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 Woolf wrote in her diary after delivering the lectures that became “A Room of One’s Own,” arguably the most important feminist manifesto of the twenti…

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Virginia Woolf 3: Orlando 1:20:20

27d ago1:20:20

1:20:20

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. Orlando is a love-story set across 300 years of English history, starting in the Elizabethan court and finishing in 1920s England. It features an irre…

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BONUS: Reading Mrs Dalloway (with Alexandra Schwartz) 29:39

27d ago29:39

29:39

"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 “Critics at Large’ she discusses the most urgent cultural matters, ranging from Sesame Street to the Pope to Meaghan and Harry to Ancient Rome. Which …

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Virginia Woolf 2: To The Lighthouse 1:09:44

30d ago1:09:44

1:09:44

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 Viriginia Woolf herself was middle aged, and recorded by Sophie and Jonty at the height of their middle aged powers. The novel was published in 1927, after…

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BONUS: Virginia Woolf, the not-so-Common Reader (with Alexandra Harris) 34:55

26d ago34:55

34:55

‘Think of a book as a very dangerous and exciting game, which it takes two to play at.’ For Virginia Woolf, reading wasn’t a passive act. It requires guts and ingenuity. At times one is locked in combat with a book, at others one is the ‘accomplice’ of a writer, like an accomplice to crime, aiding an act of daring imagination. Few people read as cl…

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Virginia Woolf 1: Mrs Dalloway 1:13:56

29d ago1:13:56

1:13:56

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Not the Secret Life of Books, as we joyfully immerse ourselves in four of Woolf's greatest books to celebrate what is probably the most extraordinary middle-aged flowering of literary talent in history. Virginia Woolf was 43 when she published Mrs. Dalloway, 100 years ago in 1925. She went on to publish To the Lighth…

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Smells Like Teen Spirit: The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole 1:07:30

2M ago1:07:30

1:07:30

Martin Amis’ Money, Thomas Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero… These books are often cited as defining works of the 1980s - serious works of literature that captured the spirit of the age. They are all great books, but spare a thought too for Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13¾. Like The Diary…

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The Secret River with Kate Grenville 54:08

1M ago54:08

54:08

This special episode on a great modern classic was recorded live at the Sydney Writers' Festival in 2025. Very few novels can genuinely claim to have changed a nation’s consciousness. The Secret River, written by Kate Grenville and published in 2005, is one of those books. It put a spotlight on a side of white settler experience that Australians ha…

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Keeping Up Appearances with the Pooters: The Diary of A Nobody 1:15:50

2M ago1:15:50

1:15:50

This episode is a cheat. It's not a real published personal diary, but a satire on published diaries. It’s a fiction, but it’s a fiction that tells us a lot about fact. Published 1892, The Diary of a Nobody is about London clerk, Charles Pooter, his wife Carrie, his son William Lupin, and numerous friends and acquaintances. Most of all, it's about …

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The Secret Life of Summer Holidays: sunburns, family arguments and holiday cottages in classic literature 49:49

2M ago49:49

49:49

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Not if it was the summer holiday that Jonty's family went on to Menorca when a stomach bug ripped through their local village. Or the ill-fated beachside retreat amid a lacerating tropical storm that Sophie took with her mother and sister to mourn her father's death. Classic literature stages endless scenes o…

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BONUS: Move Over Bridgerton: James Boswell's Big Romance 24:21

2M ago24:21

24:21

A bonus episode to share the extraordinary detail and richness of the real-time, live-streamed account James Boswell gives us of his first love affair in 1760s London. This may be the closest we can ever come to understanding what passion was like in an age of sexual libertinism and STDs before antibiotics. In our last episode, we talked about Bosw…

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A Date With Signor Gonorrhea: James Boswell's London Journal 1762 1:20:57

2M ago1:20:57

1:20:57

It’s London, 1763 - we're paying a visit to the most fashionable, literary, sexy, filthy, glamorous capital in the world. The 22 year old James Boswell, born and raised on a large country estate outside Edinburgh, has escaped his ambitious and pushy Presbyterian parents and arrived in London. They want him to follow the family footsteps and become …

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Plague, fire and hanky-panky in Swinging 1660s London: Samuel Pepys' Diary 1:19:13

2M ago1:19:13

1:19:13

Welcome to London in the swinging sixties. One man fights off a towering inferno, navigates a zombie apocalypse, and an invading fleet of evil foreigners, while doing an extraordinary amount of shagging along the way. But we’re not talking about Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. This is the Diary of Samuel Pepys, written in the - flip th…

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Breakfast with Jane Austen 52:19

3M ago52:19

52:19

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day -- especially for Jane Austen. On and off the page, Austen paid a lot of attention to the breakfast table. In real life, Austen woke before her family, played the piano and got the breakfast ready, before retreating to write for the rest of the morning. And in the novels this meal is no less foundatio…

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Oscar Wilde 4: Doing rhyme: The Ballad of Reading Gaol 1:27:09

3M ago1:27:09

1:27:09

In this episode - the last in our series on Oscar Wilde - we tell the story of the melodramatic, mediagenic, mad, melancholy end of Oscar Wilde's writing life and glittering career as the cleverest man in Britain, after his string of smash hit plays, culminating in "The Importance of Being Earnest." Almost as the curtain went up on his masterpiece …

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Life and love with MND: Lisa Genova's Every Note Played with Prof Dominic Rowe 40:32

3M ago40:32

40:32

Published in 2018, Lisa Genova’s Every Note Played follows the experiences of renowned concert pianist Richard Evans from the moment he is diagnosed with a form of Motor Neurone Disease, or MND, to his death less than two years later. It is a confronting, blow-by-blow account of the physical deterioration caused by MND, but also a testament to huma…

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Oscar Wilde 3: "A Handbag?!" The Importance of Being Earnest 1:24:35

3M ago1:24:35

1:24:35

The Importance of Being Earnest, first performed in 1895 at the sumptuous St James' Theatre in London, was Wilde’s last, and without question his greatest piece of dramatic writing. The handbag, the cucumber sandwiches, the Bunburying and the first class ticket to Worthing all come together to create a timeless classic that has been rarely out of p…

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Happier with Henry Wotton: Gretchen Rubin on Aphorisms and the Importance of Being Oscar Wilde 40:58

3M ago40:58

40:58

Gretchen Rubin is one of America’s best known and best-loved writers on how to be happy. She published her evergreen classic The Happiness Project in 2009, and it was an instant hit. She’s followed it with many more books on the habits of happiness, and she’s also co-host of a hit podcast Happier, which she hosts with her sister, the writer Elizabe…

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Oscar Wilde 2: If Looks Could Kill: The Picture of Dorian Gray 1:20:30

3M ago1:20:30

1:20:30

The Picture of Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde’s only novel, and it caused a sensation. It was used as evidence in Wilde’s trial for the crime of “gross indecency” in 1895. The conceit of the story is famous – a portrait grows old and corrupt while its human subject remains eternally youthful. But who knows what really happens in this famous modern myth…

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Classic Books vs Trump: Jill Lepore on reading her way through the first 100 days 26:20

4M ago26:20

26:20

Jill Lepore is one of America’s most renowned intellectuals. She’s Professor not only of American History, but also of Law at Harvard University; she's a staff writer at the New Yorker, and still finds time to write some of the most renowned history books of the 21st Century, including the magisterial and monumental These Truths: A History of the U…

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Oscar Wilde 1: The Happy Prince and Other Stories 1:15:11

4M ago1:15:11

1:15:11

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 demanded tolerance of homosexuality. He wrote about decadence and the corruption of youth before going out in a fireball of scandal of his own making, …

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BONUS: More 'Rivals': Actor Katherine Parkinson on the joy of Jilly Cooper and playing Lizzie Vereker in the television adaptation 41:17

4M ago41:17

41:17

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 playing Lizzie Vereker, wife of the ghastly James Vereker, and the satisfaction she finds in her characters's affair with Freddie Jones; why Jilly Cooper is…

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Bollinger, Board Battles and Bonking Galore: Jilly Cooper's Rivals 58:00

4M ago58:00

58:00

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 for power, conduct affairs with one another’s spouses, eat terrible 1980s food and listen endlessly to Chris de Burgh’s Lady in Red. Rivals was marke…

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The Epic of Gilgamesh with Robert Macfarlane 50:26

4M ago50:26

50:26

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 Gilgamesh, King of Uruk, his friendship with the wild man Enkidu, and his attempts to come to terms with his own mortality. Although incomplete, the es…

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The Tortured Poets Department: Emily Dickinson, the Transcendentalists and, yes, Taylor Swift 1:12:42

4M ago1:12:42

1:12:42

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 published only 10 in her lifetime. Instead, she bound them into little bundles of paper, tied with kitchen string. These were found after her death by her s…

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BONUS: Secret Life of Democracy (Literature at the polls) 54:00

4M ago54:00

54:00

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 them through the full political spectrum - from Ancient Athens to Shakespeare's London, the fictional towns of Middlemarch and Market Snodsbury to the …

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Guns and (war of the) Roses. The irresistible rise of Shakespeare's Richard III 1:17:18

4M ago1:17:18

1:17:18

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 space of about six months. Richard III is also known as “Crookback,” or the hunchback of Windsor Castle, because of his curvature of the spine, which prom…

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BONUS: The Disappearance of Agatha Christie 29:07

5M ago29:07

29:07

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 passed, the media went wild with excitement, vast searches involving thousands of volunteers were conducted in the Surrey countryside, and her husband A…

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Hercule Poirot, a Tunisian dagger and an evening of Mah Jong: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd 1:17:21

5M ago1:17:21

1:17:21

The three best-selling authors of all time are, in order, God, Shakespeare and Agatha Christie. Exact figures are hard to know, but the gulf between Christie and the second division is big enough to guarantee her place. She has sold over 2 billion books (and just to make that number easier to comprehend, that’s two thousand million). There are a ha…

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Who watches the Watchmen?: Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen 1:04:03

5M ago1:04:03

1:04:03

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes, wrote the Roman poet Juvenal two thousand years ago. And just in case your Latin isn’t up to scratch, we’ll translate it for you: Who watches the watchmen? That line provided inspiration to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen - arguably the first graphic novel to join the ranks of classic literature. Published as a …

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SLoB's Secret Life of Pets 58:07

5M ago58:07

58:07

From Macavity to Samuel Johnson’s Hodge, Buck to Rochester’s Pilot, what is classic literature without its pets? One of the most affecting scenes in The Odyssey, that foundation stone of western literature, occurs when Argos, Odysseus’ aged dog, dies at the moment of reunion with his long lost owner. Not even the knowledge of his afterlife as a sho…

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George Orwell 6: What's in Room 101? 1984 Part 2 55:49

6M ago55:49

55:49

As Shakespeare almost wrote: Orwell That Ends Well. While our six-part series on George Orwell comes to a triumphant end, Orwell’s life - alas - did not. He died too young and deeply pessimistic about the future of the world. In this last episode, Sophie and Jonty look at the bright side of life in Airstrip One, speculate what really lies within Ro…

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George Orwell 5: Sex crime, anyone? 1984 pt1 57:41

6M ago57:41

57:41

Newspeak, Big Brother, the Thought Police, Room 101, doublethink, sex crime, the Ministry of Truth. Few books have generated quite as many outlandish yet unforgettable concepts as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. So much so that Orwell’s name is now an adjective - Orwellian - which, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary means ‘relating t…

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George Orwell 4: Come on, Eileen! Anna Funder, Mrs Orwell and Wifedom 1:00:06

6M ago1:00:06

1:00:06

George Orwell is one of the most famous names in classic literature, thanks to his novels Animal Farm and 1984, both dystopian fables of worlds gone mad, ruled over by autocratic pigs and authoritarian governments who monitor their citizens– or barnyard companions – every move. And yet for all his commitment to political and social justice, or at l…

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George Orwell 3: Murder in the Barnyard: Animal Farm 1:20:13

6M ago1:20:13

1:20:13

Animal Farm is George Orwell’s micro masterpiece, an animal fable that offers a devastating critique of Stalinist Russia and the rise of totalitarianism. Orwell described it to a friend as a “little squib,” but it’s much more than that: a tiny atom bomb that lands a structurally perfect hit on mid-20th century political authoritarianism and communi…

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World Poetry Day Double-Bill: Can poetry change the world? The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon 54:19

6M ago54:19

54:19

Together, Siegfried Sassoon’s The Old Huntsman (1917) and Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918) are among the greatest examples of protest art in British history. Sassoon was a decorated war hero, who took a stand - when few others dared - on the moral emptiness, institutional corruption and brutality of the First World War. Alongside his poetry, S…

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George Orwell 2: The Revolution SHOULD NOT be televised: Homage to Catalonia 1:23:03

6M ago1:23:03

1:23:03

War is boring; revolution is boring; politics is boring. That’s the message of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. But, somehow, Homage to Catalonia itself is NOT boring. Published in 1938, it charts Orwell’s experience on, behind and beyond the front line of the fight against Fascism in the Spanish Civil War. Through the course of his narrative, …

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World Poetry Day Double-Bill: Elizabeth Bishop's Geography III with Rachel Cohen 51:10

6M ago51:10

51:10

Elizabeth Bishop is one of those poets who’s often referred to as a writer’s writer, but this doesn’t mean her poems are hard to read. On the contrary: as one of the most loved and admired twentieth-century poets, Bishop has the rare ability to do high-low. She’s enjoyable and accessible and also intensely artful and complex, not to mention very fu…

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George Orwell 1: The Best Gap Yah, great food writing and Paris hotels: Down and Out in Paris and London 1:20:03

6M ago1:20:03

1:20:03

In the winter of 1927, George Orwell dropped his aitches, pulled on his distressed tailored trousers, and took the first of many trips to the underbelly of London society. Over the following years, he spent long stints amongst the homeless and starving people of both Paris and London. He collected these experiences into his first book Down and Out …

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International Women's Day Bonus: Was Shakespeare a Woman? Jodi Picoult says yes! 49:44

6M ago49:44

49:44

Legendary bestseller Jodi Picoult is also a graduate of the Princeton English Department, and this week she came back to teach class! Sophie recorded a live episode at the Princeton Public Library in front of a packed house of Jodi fans who were delighted to hear why she believes that when it comes to Shakespeare's best plays, a women was holding t…

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Magnetic chemistry, social anxiety, and the in-laws from hell: Pride & Prejudice (aka Meet The Bennets) 1:24:39

7M ago1:24:39

1:24:39

By many reckonings, this is the most famous novel in English. It’s also the book Jane Austen described as her own “Darling Child.” As we head to the milestone of Jane’s 250th Birthday in December (get ready for the minced chicken and negus party) Sophie and Jonty dig into one of the most joyful, funny, sexy stories ever told. In this episode we ask…

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Self-Help, dodgy marriages and the siren call of Australia: David Copperfield Part 2 54:17

7M ago54:17

54:17

In Part 2 of David Copperfield, we pick up David where we left him, sobbing at the door of Betsey Trotwood’s house in Dover. From this low, David’s life changes - he is no longer a victim, but embarks on a (very long) journey towards self-reliance, re-encountering old friends like Micawbers and Steerforth, but also new characters like Uriah Heep an…

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‘Umble beginnings, childhood neglect, and did Dickens steal from Charlotte Bronte: David Copperfield 1:01:58

7M ago1:01:58

1:01:58

David Copperfield is the name of an American illusionist, whose feats included levitating over the Grand Canyon, walking through the Great Wall of China and making an airplane disappear. It’s also the name of novel by Charles Dickens. Published in serial form between 1849 and 1850, David Copperfield charts the degradation and eventual success of it…

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BONUS: SLoB's Secret Crushes and Clandestine Encounters pt 2 43:48

7M ago43:48

43:48

In part 2 of SLoB's Valentine's special, more heroes and heroines from the world of classic books get the brutal Tinder treatment as Sophie and Jonty assess the romantic moves of your literary faves. They are in full agreement concerning the lead characters of Sense & Sensibility and Go Tell It On The Mountain, but the conversation turns fractious …

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Free love in Paris, male wrestling and murder: Giovanni's Room 1:19:48

7M ago1:19:48

1:19:48

It's Black History Month and Sophie and Jonty are bringing their analytical chops once again to the giant of 20th-century literature, James Baldwin. In his debut novel, Go Tell It On the Mountain, Baldwin had captured the experience of growing up in 1930s Harlem. In his second novel, Giovanni’s Room, published in 1956, he focused instead on his exp…

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BONUS: SLoB's Secret Crushes and Clandestine Encounters pt 1 49:20

7M ago49:20

49:20

It's Valentine's Day and love is quite literally in the air as the Secret Life of Books beams, via a complex network of satellites and data banks, to your ears. In this Bonus Episode, Sophie and Jonty reflect on what they've learnt about love from the classics, and rank the leading men and ladies of the books covered so far as lovers. St Valentine …