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 United States, the brilliant Secret History of Wonder Woman and Sophie’s personal favourite, a history of King Phillip’s War and the origins of American identity.

For the first 100 days of the new US presidency, Jill Lepore turned to the classics-- the Penguin Little Black Classics to be exact. In these miniature volumes of great writing, Jill found the imaginative intelligence, resilience and sense of ordinary pleasures she needed to abide with what's going on across America -- and at Harvard specifically -- as a result of Trump's turbulent regime. Listen and learn how the classics reconnect us with deep truths that we might "hold to be self-evident," but which have so often been under threat across human history.

Books mentioned in this episode and published in Penguin Little Black Classics:

The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio (~1350)

"As Kingfishers Catch Fire," Gerard Manley Hopkins (1877)

Anon. The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue (late 13C)

Wailing Ghosts, Pu Songling (c.1640)

"A Modest Proposal," Jonathan Swift (1727)

Tang Dynasty Poets (c8C)

"On the Beach at Night Alone," Walt Whitman (1856)

A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees, Kenko (13C)

"The Eve of St Agnes," John Keats (1819)

"Travels in the Land of Serpents and Pearls," Marco Polo (c1300)

"Caligula," Suetonius (121 CE)

"Olalla," Robert Louis Stevenson (1885)

The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848)

"Trimalchio's Feast", Petronius (c.60 CE)

Inferno, Dante (14C)

"The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale," Geoffrey Chaucer (c1390)

Essais, Michel de Montaigne (1580)

"The Beautifull Cassandra," Jane Austen (1788)

Homer, The Iliad and The Odyssey

"The Maldive Shark," Herman Melville (1888)

Socrates’ Defence, Plato (399 BCE)

"Goblin Market," Christina Rossetti (1862)

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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, his reputation shattered in the infamous trial that followed. 

So, was Oscar Wilde the great genius of his day or just a rather talented man with a knack for publicity? Was he a martyr in the history of gay activism, or just a self-absorbed pain in the arse? These are just some of the questions Sophie and Jonty are asking in the first of a four part series on Oscar Wilde. 

In this first episode, they look at his early years and how cultural and political movements of the time shaped his first great work - the seemingly timeless fairy-tales of The Happy Prince and Other Stories. Into these stories, Wilde condensed years of scholarship, literary criticism and the development of a personal aesthetic and philosophy. It is a short book and deceptively simple because these stories - like all the best fairytales - conceal deeper truths about human experience. Most importantly, through them Wilde found his voice as a writer, unleashing the extraordinary creative outpouring of the following ten years. 

Texts referred to: 

Oscar: A Life (2018) by Matthew Sturgis

Alice in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll 

Children’s and Household Tales (1812) by the Brothers Grimm

Doctor Faustus (c.1594) Christopher Marlowe

Patience (1881) by Gilbert and Sullivan (extract from 1961 recording with John Reed) 

Study of the Greek Poets (1873) by JA Symonds 

Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) by Walter Pater

Social Life in Greece (1874) by John Pentland Mahaffy

David Copperfield (1850) by Charles Dickens

A Christmas Carol (1843) by Charles Dickens 

Hard Times (1854) by Charles Dickens

Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker 

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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 marketed as an airport book back in the day, but beneath the brash cover is a sophisticated story that draws in surprising ways from classic literature to create what is now considered to be a modern classic. 

Sophie and Jonty why they are so drawn to Rivals, what we can learn about the 1980s from reading it today, and the ways in which it engages with a wide range of literary influences, including Austen, Trollope and Yeats, but also Valley of the Dolls and the works of Jackie Collins and Danielle Steele. 

BOOKS DISCUSSED/ALLUDED TO: 

Rivals (1988) by Jilly Cooper 

Mansfield Park (1814) by Jane Austen 

Pride and Prejudice (1813) by Jane Austen 

The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) by WB Yeats 

A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-1975) by Anthony Powell

Barchester Towers (1857) by Anthony Trollope 

Possession (1990) by AS Byatt

Oscar and Lucinda (1988) by Peter Carey

Bilgewater (1977) by Jane Gardam 

Middlemarch (1872) by George Eliot

Cocktail (1988) screenplay by Heywood Gould

Lady in Red (1986) by Chris de Burgh

Valley of the dolls (1966) by Jacqueline Susann

The Bitch (1979) by Jackie Collins 

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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 essence of the story - and many passages - are preserved thanks to the work of dedicated Assyriologists past and present.

To discuss this extraordinary work, Sophie and Jonty are joined by Robert Macfarlane, author of The Wild Places (2007), The Old Ways (2012), Underland (2019) and now Is A River Alive? (2025). Rob has been obsessed with Gilgamesh for many years - what it has to tell us about humanity and the environment.

BOOKS REFERRED TO:

The Epic of Gilgamesh (1999) translated by Andrew George

Gilgamesh: A New English Version (2004) by Stephen Mitchell

Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic (2021) by Sophus Helle

We Have Never Been Modern (1991) by Bruno Latour

Camera Lucida (1981) by Roland Barthes

Civilization and its Discontents (1930) by Sigmund Freud

The Country and the City (1973) by Raymond Williams

People of the River (2021) by Grace Karskens

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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 sister Lavinia and after many stops and starts the first collection was published in 1890 by her friend and mentor, the critic and abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson. It was an instant hit with 11 editions in less than 2 years.

The spontaneity and freshness of the poems appealed to readers, as well as their fragmentary, transient, unfinished quality, as though they were moments of thought or feeling, grabbed out of thin air.

She wrote about death and life, ordinary objects, the natural world, light, air, love and god with a kind of improvisational vim that proved timeless.

The legend of Dickinson is more flamboyant than the writing, which is precise, miniaturist and modest. In this episode Sophie and Jonty talk about the relationship between Dickinson’s world in Amherst and her world on the scraps and fragments of paper she wrote on; the tensions between her reclusive persona and her prolific and highly professional writing life; her disdaining publication and her making sure that it would happen, and the ambiguities of her most intimate relationships. How has such a quiet and unforthcoming poet destined to become one of the most relatable, personal and confessional voices in the history of world poetry?

Books etc referred to in this episode:

Martha Ackmann These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson

Cristanne Miller and Karen Sánchez-Eppler Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson

Diana Fuss The Sense of An Interior

Lisa Brooks The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

Emily Bronte, “No Coward Soul Am I”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese and Aurora Leigh

Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus and On Heroes

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays

Henry David Thoreau, Walden, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Cape Cod

Isaac Watts, Hymns

Taylor Swift, The Tortured Poets Department.

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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 prompted the great historian and Tudor apologist Thomas More to describe him as “little of stature, ill featured of limbs, crooked-backed,” a condition that made him “malicious, wrathful and perverse.” Shakespeare used Richard’s villainy and disability with unprecedented skill and daring, creating a character whose deformity and appetite for evil became assets and sources of charm.

Richard III is Shakespeare’s first masterpiece. He probably wrote it in 1592 or 93, after warming-up with Taming of the Shrew, Henry VI parts 1, 2 and 3, Two Gentlemen of Verona and Titus Andronicus. With the psychological depth of these characters and his analysis of relationships under the strain of political volatility and anxiety, Shakespeare accessed a new kind of writing, influenced by Marlowe’s hit Tamburlaine. In Richard III we see the cruelty and misogynistic violence of Shrew reappear, along with the lust for blood that Shakespeare front loaded in Titus Andronicus. And we see the sit-com like return of the royal family from the Henry VI plays – all of whom would have been familiar to Elizabethan audiences. Richard III is like the season finale of Succession, when we find out what’s going to happen to all the scheming, unpleasant, entitled nepo babies and their underlings.

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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 Archie let the side down with unsympathetic speculation about what might have really happened. 

Eleven days later she was discovered staying incognito in a spa hotel in Harrogate, having suffered a terrible breakdown, involving memory loss and confusion about her identity. After a short recovery, she resumed her career becoming the best-selling novelist of all time. 

Sophie and Jonty recount the story of what happened during those eleven days. 

BOOKS/FILMS READ OR REFERRED TO: 

Agatha Christie (2022) by Lucy Worsley 

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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 handful of contenders for her greatest book overall, but The Murder of Roger Ackroyd - first serialised exactly 100 years ago in 1925 - is usually amongst them. 

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd tells the story of murderous happenings in the English country village of Kings Abbot, peaking with the mysterious death of local squire Roger Ackroyd. By happy circumstance, the famous detective Hercule Poirot has recently retired to the village. Already bored stiff by his attempts to grow marrows in his garden, he leaps at the chance of solving a crime, slowly revealing the hidden desires and secrets of his suspects before the grand reveal. 

Sophie and Jonty turn detective too to work out why this relatively short book with its action never ranging far from a small village has proven so successful and influential. It has been adapted many times for radio, television and film with Charles Laughton, Orson Welles and (of course) David Suchet playing Poirot. Its influence on popular culture is much broader, inspiring everything from the board game Cluedo to films like Knives Out. 

In this episode, Sophie and Jonty going to reveal the secrets behind Agatha Christie’s unique take on detective fiction, tell the origin story of her most famous creation Hercule Poirot, and show how the publication of the book was an inciting incident for her infamous disappearance a few months afterwards. Their investigations take them surfing with Agatha in Hawaii, into speculations about the origin of the Wagon Wheel biscuit and, of course, some truly dreadful impersonations of Hercule Poirot. 

SPOILER ALERT! We reveal the identity of the murderer, but only in the final part of the episode and give clear warning before we do. 

BOOKS/FILMS READ OR REFERRED TO: 

The Life and Times of Hercule Poirot (199) by Anne Hart 

Agatha Christie (2022) by Lucy Worsley 

Who Killed Roger Ackroyd (1998) by Pierre Bayard 

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd radio play (1939) by Orson Welles  

One Thousand And One Nights 

The Chalk Circle (14th century)

Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee (18th century) 

The Murder in the Rue Morgue (1841) by Edgar Allan Poe 

Oliver Twist (1838) by Charles Dickens

Bleak House (1853) by Charles Dickens

The Woman in White (1860) by Wilkie Collins

The Moonstone (1868) by Wilkie Collins 

The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1921) by Agatha Christie

The Wasteland (1922) by TS Eliot

Ulysses (1922) by James Joyce 

Cane (1923) by Jean Toomer 

Mrs Dalloway (1925) by Virginia Woolf 

The Weary Blues (1926) by Langston Hughes 

The Sun Also Rises (1926) by Ernest Hemingway 

Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker 

Heart of Darkness (1899) by Joseph Conrad 

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