All Episodes

Canterbury Tales (General Prologue) by Geoffrey Chaucer

The Other Bennet Sister with author Janice Hadlow

Back to School 4: Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld

Back to School 3: A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines

Back to School 2: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Back to School 1: Tom Brown's School Days

The Secret Life of (Literary) Honeymoons

Beowulf: Inside the Anglo-Saxon mind

"On Morrison": a conversation with Namwali Serpell

Toni Morrison 3: Beloved

SLoB Goes to the Oscars: Frankenstein vs Hamnet

Saved from Fire: the Toni Morrison Archives

Toni Morrison 2: Song of Solomon

The Other Bronte Girl: Anne Bronte's Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Jane Austen's Birthday: why everyone wants to party with Jane

Emerald Fennell's "Wuthering Heights": is the hype worth it?

Wuthering Heights: Is this really the greatest love story of all time?

Frankenstein in Oxford: A Conversation with Richard Ovenden, OBE

Toni Morrison 1: The Bluest Eye

Queens of Crime 4: The Tiger in the Smoke by Margery Allingham

To See or Not to See? Hamnet tune-up session

Queens of Crime 3: A Murder is Announced by Agatha Christie

Queens of Crime 2: Vintage Murder by Ngaio Marsh

The Golden Age of Crime with Grantchester's James Runcie

Queens of Crime 1: Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers

By George (Eliot) She's Done It! The road to Middlemarch

A SLoB Christmas Cracker

The Women Who Made Jane Austen

Big Cat Theory: William Blake's The Tyger

Henry James 3: Turn of the Screw

Henry James 2: Colm Tóibín on Henry James

Henry James 1: The Portrait of a Lady

Greece Lightnin': My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell

American Horror 3: Salem's Lot by Stephen King

American Horror 2: Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin

American Horror: The Haunting of Hill House

Montaigne pt2: A Montaigne out of a mole hill (with Rowan Tomlinson)

Montaigne pt1: Climb Every Montaigne (with Stephen Greenblatt)

SLoB's Four (literary) weddings and a funeral

Wilkie Collins 2: The Moonstone

BONUS: Jennifer Egan on the Woman in White

Wilkie Collins 1: The Woman in White

SLOB Reads: The Sonnet with Paul Muldoon

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

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

Virginia Woolf 5: The Waves

Virginia Woolf 4: A Room Of One's Own

Virginia Woolf 3: Orlando

BONUS: Reading Mrs Dalloway (with Alexandra Schwartz)

Virginia Woolf 2: To The Lighthouse

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

Virginia Woolf 1: Mrs Dalloway

Smells Like Teen Spirit: The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole

The Secret River with Kate Grenville

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

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

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

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

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

Breakfast with Jane Austen

Oscar Wilde 4: Doing rhyme: The Ballad of Reading Gaol

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

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

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

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

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

Oscar Wilde 1: The Happy Prince and Other Stories

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

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

The Epic of Gilgamesh with Robert Macfarlane

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

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

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

BONUS: The Disappearance of Agatha Christie

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

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

SLoB's Secret Life of Pets

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

George Orwell 5: Sex crime, anyone? 1984 pt1

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

George Orwell 3: Murder in the Barnyard: Animal Farm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shakespeare does 'Succession': Rory Stewart on King Lear

Wizards, Hobbits and WWII: Dominic Sandbrook on The Lord of the Rings

Love and Beauty Bonus: Geraldine Brooks picks Gilead as the great modern classic

Soldier Preachers, late-life love and Soapy the cat in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead

Jane Austen goes to the dark side: social turmoil and scandalous texting in Sense and Sensibility

Cannes, a white mess jacket, and the pure joy of P.G. Wodehouse's "Right Ho, Jeeves"

The Craft of Writing, the Booker Prize from Australia: Charlotte Wood on My Name is Lucy Barton

Literature's great parties: launch 2025 in style with Lady Macbeth, Count Dracula and the Mad Hatter

Did Dickens Change the Face of Christmas Forever? Scrooge, Tiny Tim and the First Ever Turkey

The Albatross Curse, Bad Weddings and Lots of Opium: Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Victorian dresses, teenage passions and fiction’s scariest picnic: Picnic at Hanging Rock

Please Sir, may we have some more? Oliver Twist, sex work and criminal underclasses in Victorian London

The world's most famous classicist on the world's most famous classic: Mary Beard and The Odyssey

Bonus Live Ep: hosts' secrets revealed and the classics stripped bare!

Jane Austen does gothic horror with insta-ready clothes and great interiors: Northanger Abbey

James: National Book Award global hit; a Huck Finn rewrite the world needed; plot twists you'll never guess

Huckleberry Finn: but wait, maybe THIS is the great American novel?

Hamnet: sexy witches replace skulls and soliloquies

Hamlet: Shakespeare's secret double or pain in neck?

Midsummer Nights Dream: are true love and sexual attraction magic tricks?

Go Tell It On The Mountain: growing up Black, poor and gay in 1930s New York

The Great Gatsby: is this THE great American novel?

To Kill a Mockingbird: racism, gun violence and coming of age in the 1930s South

Wolf Hall: is this the best historical novel ever written?

Dracula: vampires even weirder than you think. And they may have started WWI

Frankenstein: the ultimate monster; the first A.I story; Mary Shelly's multi-generational grief

Wuthering Heights: passionate love affairs and dysfunctional families go together

Wide Sargasso Sea 2: bohemianism, madess and celebrity back in England

Wide Sargasso Sea 1: tropical gothic in the West Indies and Jane Eyre disrupted

Jane Eyre 2: the Brontes' real lives are even wilder than their fiction

Jane Eyre 1: passion, madness, gaslighting and bad hair days

Gulliver's Travels Part 2

Gulliver's Travels Part 1

Macbeth: terrorism, gunpowder and treason in James I's London

Alice in Wonderland: rabbit-holes, mad mathematics and the elephant in the room

Secret Life of Books Trailer