MrBallen Podcast: Strange, Dark & Mysterious Stories
Often charts alongside it
Arts
Secret Life of Books
by Sophie Gee and Jonty Claypole
Today: #181 in Arts on our combined chart.
Chart positions today
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Ranking history
Position on the Arts combined chart over the last 30 days. Toggle platforms to compare their positions. Lower rank numbers are better; #1 is at the top.
View as table
| Date | Combined Rank | Apple Podcasts |
|---|---|---|
| Oct 6 | #181 | #150 |
| Oct 5 | — | #193 |
| Oct 4 | — | #184 |
| Oct 3 | — | #191 |
About the show
Every book has two stories: the one it tells, and the one it hides.The Secret Life of Books is a fascinating, addictive, often shocking, occasionally hilarious weekly podcast starring Sophie Gee, an English professor at Princeton University, and Jonty Claypole, formerly director of arts at the BBC. Every week these virtuoso critics and close friends take an iconic book and reveal the hidden story behind the story: who made it, their clandestine motives, the undeclared stakes, the scandalous backstory and above all the secret, mysterious meanings of books we thought we knew.-- To join the Secret Life of Books Club visit: www.secretlifeofbooks.org-- Please support us on Patreon to keep the lights on in the SLoB studio: https://patreon.com/SecretLifeofBooks528?utm_medium=unknown&utm_source=join_link&utm_campaign=creatorshare_creator&utm_content=copyLinkinsta: https://www.instagram.com/secretlifeofbookspodcast/youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@secretlifeofbookspodcast/shorts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Latest episodes
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Factory settings: Elizabeth Gaskell's North & South
October 6, 2026 · 1 hr 25 minElizabeth Gaskell might be the most underrated novelist of the 19th century. North and South was first published by Charles Dickens in Household Words from 1854-55. But Dickens and Gaskell came to blows over his heavy-handed editing style…
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Gothic horror in the age of AI: Alma Katsu on her new novel Incarnate
October 2, 2026 · 31 minWhat do you get when you cross an NSA and CIA analyst with a bestselling horror writer? You get Alma Katsu, who talks to Sophie and Jonty about publishing her new novel Incarnate at the exact moment when the threats and unregulated dangers…
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Trashing Up Troy: Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida
September 29, 2026 · 1 hr 13 minLast month we left listeners with the tantalizing question: what happened next in literary history after Chaucer wrote Troilus and Criseyde? This was a serious cliffhanger, and it’s unforgivable that instead of returning the following week…
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Secret Life of Planes
September 25, 2026 · 35 minEvery aircraft is different. That's why we're asking you to listen to the following romp through some of our favorite flight-scenes in literature. Recorded from Heathrow Terminal 3, and then in the air, shortly after takeoff on QF2 from…
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Secret Life of the River Thames
September 22, 2026 · 1 hr 8 minSophie and Jonty, coming to you live from London, on the front lines of classic literature. They’re sitting on some steps leading down to the River Thames, right next to the Globe Theatre, on Southbank. True, they stop short of plunging…
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Secret Life of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
September 18, 2026 · 31 minSLOB goes off-script! While in London a couple of weeks ago, Sophie and Jonty got so excited in the Pre-Raphaelite room of Tate Britain that they whipped out their recording equipment and dashed off an impromptu episode. The Pre-Raphaelite…
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Secret Life of the British Museum
September 15, 2026 · 1 hr 0 minViriginia Woolf hated it and Karl Marx loved it. Woolf starts her iconic A Room of One’s Own by skewering it as a monument to British patriarchy and toxic masculinity. The inevitable sequel to lunching and dining at Oxbridge seemed…
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Secret Life of Reading (with Maggie O'Farrell and Ben Alderson-Day)
September 8, 2026 · 54 minThis episode was recorded at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, with literary superstar Maggie O'Farrell and one of Britain's leading psychologists, Ben Alderson-Day. On the Secret Life of Books, we talk about classic books and the…