Last year, the SLoBlight lingered briefly on Agatha Christie when we celebrated the centenary of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd from 1925. This book, more than any other, heralded the start of the so-called Golden Age of Detective Fiction between the two world wars. 

Taught, short and fraught with menace, these novels were in large part a response to the chaos and brutality of the First World War. The public needed order and diversion. Highly regulated games became popular - contract bridge, crosswords, Mah Jong - and so did detective fiction. These games indeed frequently appear in As the initiation ceremony to the Detection Club shows, detective fiction was a sort of literary game - with clear rules of engagement and a puzzle for the reader to unravel. 

In this mini-series on the Golden Age of Detective Fiction we’re looking at what happened after Roger Ackroyd. As the 1930s darkened with the great depression, the rise of fascism and - dare we say it - the rather bleak view of human nature contained within Freudian psychoanalysis, so too did detective fiction. At the forefront of these changes were the so-called Queens of Crime - Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham.

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George Eliot’s Middlemarch is the Mount Everest of Victorian fiction. A book so brilliant and monumental that it’s taken us a year of planning to take it on. But as we close out 2025, we’ve established our Middlemarch base camp and started the climb.

To put it another way, we’ve recorded an episode in which we treat listeners to the story behind the story of the greatness that is Mary Ann Evans, the woman who became George Eliot. Middlemarch is, in many people’s opinions, the greatest novel in English. To help understand why it’s so amazing, how Eliot learned to write like this, and her life as a reader, writer, daughter and lover (plus, the story behind her pen name), we give you this primer episode.

Starting this Friday, we have new subscriber-only episodes every two weeks about Middlemarch itself, going book by book through this magnificent classic. This is how Eliot meant Middlemarch to be read - through 8 stages. One for each of the serialized volumes that ran through 1871 and 1872 before the book was published as a whole in 1874.

Join up for the bookclub by becoming a paid subscriber on Patreon, and come along with us for the adventure.

Books discussed in this episode:

George Eliot, Middlemarch

George Eliot’s translated works: David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined; Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity; Benedictus de Spinoza, Ethics

George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life

George Eliot, Adam Bede

George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

George Eliot, Silas Marner

George Eliot, Romola

George Eliot, Felix Holt, The Radical

George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

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It won't come as a surprise to SLOB fans that the literary classics invented Christmas.

But if you've got your finger on the buzzer and are already mouthing the words "Dickens, A Christmas Cracker" think again.

We take you back to Christmas Eve, somewhere in North Wales, around about 1385 (brrrr). Cue the giant, jolly yet murderous Greene Knight, who shows up in the local mead hall, and issues a complicated and charmingly allegorical seasonal challenge to the Knights of the Round Table.

From there we pay visits to the frankly unsatisfactory Christmases of the English Renaissance (wet, high-fiber pudding porridge, anyone?), the austere anti-Christmases of Puritan England, the weak-tea Christmas-adjacent efforts of the eighteenth-century, and then — boom — the advent of Victorian Christmas excess, with trees, fairy lights, turkeys, and giant inflatable santas in every front yard.

We wish all our beloved SLOB listeners a Merry Christmas, and whether you celebrate or not we know you'll find the Cracker a veritable trove of literary trinkets and tidbits.

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Unless you've been living under a rock, you'll know that Jane Austen has a big birthday this week -- her 250th to be exact. Happy Birthday Jane!

Over here on SLOB we're throwing Jane a party, and we've invited guests. They're truly the guests of honor. The women who made Jane Austen. You may not know all of their names, or any of them. We introduce some literary superstars from their own day, who influenced Austen's craft, storytelling, irony and encouraged her appetite for wild, subversive stories.

We tend to see Austen as a lone genius, carving out a voice for women in a world where they were often unheard. She was, in fact, just a particularly brilliant member of a wider social and literary movement. She was great, and she was great because she stood on the bonnets of giantesses. 

Please meet the bolters, bad-asses, barn-stormers, bold adventurers. The bloody-minded and the bloody-brilliant.

Writers and books mentioned in the episode:

Aphra Behn, Oroonoko and Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister

Delarivier Manley, The New Atlantis

Eliza Haywood, Love in Excess

Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote and Henrietta

Ann Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance; The Romance of the Forest; The Mysteries of Udolpho; and The Italian

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women; A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark; Maria; or, the Wrongs of Woman

Frances Burney, Evelina, Cecilia, Camilla and The Wanderer

Charlotte Smith, Elegiac Sonnets and The Old Manor House

Elizabeth Inchbald, A Simple Story

Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent, Harrington and Belinda.

Jane Austen, The Beautifull Cassandra (juvenilia)

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Are you a cat-person or a tyger-person? William Blake was both. Find out why such a big fuss about "The Tyger," which never fails to show up in google searches for the best poem in English.

"The Tyger" has a lot going for it: short, punchy, mystical and definitely about a tiger.

But beyond that, everything is up for grabs. Who was this William Blake, not just one of the most loved poets of all time, but among the strangest. Had he actually seen a tiger in 1794, or is his tiger a metaphor for other powerful, scary, orange things, like the French Revolution, child-labor, or other Romantic Poets? Why were tigers in the news at the time, and what does Blake's poem have to do with much-loved mechanical tiger in the Victoria and Albert museum? Sophie and Jonty discuss Blake's quirky brilliance as an illustrator, his similarity to Chagall, his early life and late obsession with John Milton, and the literary rarity of Blake's being both a Great Poet and a Nice Guy.

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Stephen King and Shirley Jackson agree that The Turn of the Screw is the GOAT of ghost-stories. It’s a gripping, excellently creepy potboiler about a mad governess and a pair of haunted children in a scary Victorian country house.

Henry James already had 14 novels and a load of short fiction behind him when he wrote The Turn of the Screw, and he channeled his talent for opaque, ambiguous storytelling to come up with one of the most truly chilling psychological thrillers ever written.

The novella – yes we’re happy to report that this is a short read – was serialized over three months in a magazine called Collier’s Weekly and then reprinted with another story as The Two Magics. It was a hit, which it needed to be because avid listeners to SLOB will remember that the 1890s in London was a competitive time for supernatural page turners. We’re looking at you, Dracula, Sherlock Holmes and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Find out why this is the decade of the unputdownable classic

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One of the world's favorite novelists, on his own favorite novelist. Colm Toibin has written many beloved novels, for which he has won many prestigious prizes. The novels include Brooklyn and Long Island; The Magician and The Master. This last is Colm's fictional recreation of Henry James' extraordinary career-save in which he bounced back from the failure of his West End play, Guy Domville, to write, in rapid succession, several of the greatest masterpieces of 19thC fiction.

It takes confidence imaginatively to inhabit the mind and creative life of Henry James, the writer who, more than anyone before him, worked out how to inhabit his characters' minds and creative lives. Not only does Colm pull it off in The Master, he repeats the trick in many other novels, giving us characters of immense emotional and psychological depth.

Sophie and Jonty quickly realized why Colm had felt able to tackle the ultimate challenge of mind-reading Henry James. Colm, it quickly emerges, is a staggeringly astute literary critic and craft-teacher. Aspiring writers, masters of their craft, and curious readers alike will be blown away by the fluency and virtuosity of Colm's account of what he's learned from Henry James, his own development as a writer, and much more.

Colm Toibin, The Master, Brooklyn, Long Island.

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Many readers consider The Portrait of a Lady to be the greatest novel in English. But for some reason, James' fellow novelists loved to dump on him. Nabokov called him a "pale porpoise," and said his books were strictly for "non-smokers." Virginia Woolf, who knew him as a family friend, wrote, "we have his works here, and I read them, and can’t find anything but faintly tinged rose water, urbane and sleek, but vulgar, and as pale as Walter Lamb. Is there really any sense in it?" T.S. Eliot said that he had "a mind so fine no idea could penetrate it." Ouch.

Sophie and Jonty beg to differ. For once, we think Virginia Woolf got it completely wrong. Serialized simultaneously in America and Britain over 1880/81, A Portrait of Lady is one of the great peaks of English writing. It tells the story of Isabel Archer, an American heiress, who is determined to enjoy a life of travel and independence, only to fall into the clutches of a gaslighting con-artist called Gilbert Osmond.

James' first masterpiece is a gripping domestic thriller, which marked a revolution in the portrayal of women in literature, creating a heroine who is psychologically complex, outspoken, transgressive and determined not to be pinned down by Victorian moral standards.

It also marks a revolution in our understanding of the human mind. Henry James’ brother was the so-called Father of American Psychology William James. Both of them tackled the question of what really goes on in the mind in different ways. It has one of the best opening sections ever, and one of the most fascinating and ambiguous endings. It's not for the faint-hearted reader, sure, but it repays every moment of a reader's attention.

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SLoB is turning 1! To celebrate, Sophie and Jonty re-read one of their all time favorites, My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell.

My Family and Other Animals (1956) is the beloved, hilarious, brilliant chronicle of a childhood idyll — which is also a series of comic disasters — set on the Ionian Greek Island of Corfu.

The memoir is the first part of a trilogy that includes Birds, Beasts and Relatives and The Garden of the Gods and Gerald Durrell wrote dozens of other books about his life as a naturalist and conversationist. 

But My Family was his break-out hit that made him into a celebrity-animal whisperer, and royalties from the book allowed him to establish the famous Jersey Zoo for wildlife conservation. Long before the zoo, however, came the celebrity animals of the Corfu years, whom we meet in this glorious memoir: Quasimodo the pigeon, Achilles the Tortoise, Aleko the seagull, Ulysses the Owl, Sally the Donkey, Widdle and Puke the puppies and of course, Roger the dog.

Sophie and Jonty dive into the story behind the story of everyone’s favorite animal story and learn what was really going on behind the scenes of this delightful but dysfunctional family. Find out why “Mother,” Mrs. Durrell, moved with her children to Greece after a life in British India and Bournemouth; learn about the full identity of the irascible and hilarious brother Larry, and hear what happened to the other Durrell siblings after they became famous.

And for all the beauty and bucolic happiness of Corfu in the 1930s, there was backdrop of complex and fascinating geopolitical unrest across the Eastern Mediterranean, which Sophie wants to discuss in much greater depth than Jonty has patience for.

Mentioned in the episode:

Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals, Birds, Beasts and Relatives, The Garden of the Gods.

Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet; Prospero’s Cell

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Salem’s Lot (1975) is Stephen King’s second published novel, and many would say it's his best. It tells the story of a plague of vampires running amok in a blue-collar town in New England and the band of heroes who come together to fight them. 

We’re aware that many listeners may not have read a Stephen King novel, although they will probably have seen - and enjoyed - a film adaptation, and may wonder what Salem’s Lot has to do with a podcast about classic books. 

This episode answers that question by telling the story of how and why Stephen King became the biggest horror writer in the world. Since his debut with Carrie in 1974, he has published 60 novels and sold over 400 million books. He is one of the most successful writers ever - and films adapted from his books and stories include The Shawshank Redemption, The Shining, Stand by Me and Misery - all landmarks of cinema based on brilliant writing. And though only one of these four books is a horror novel, in this episode we stay firmly in the horror lane and get to work figuring out what makes Salem’s Lot so enduringly gripping.

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