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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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 stand-alone comic in twelve issues between 1986 and 1987, and compiled later that year, Watchmen did for comics what Sergeant Pepper’s did for pop music, legitimising them as a serious artform in the eyes of many. Watchmen is influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Pynchon and Jorge Luis Borges as much as Superman and Batman.

It tells the story of a group of morally-dubious, has-been superheroes, who are being picked off one-by-one by a mysterious killer against the backdrop of nuclear threat. These are the ‘watchmen’ of the title, but - as the quote from Juvenal suggests - pity the society that is looked after by these guys. Sure, they fight crime, but they also commit a lot of it - and even they aren’t sure if the world is a better place for their existence.  

While the book isn’t short on action, its characters also discuss philosophy, analyse the history of the comic as an art-form and engage in commercial ventures to capitalise on their own story. 

Some time ago, when TIME Magazine listed the 100 most important books of the past century, Watchmen was on the list, wedged somewhere between Lolita and Things Fall Apart (in this case you really do have the watch the watchmen because one of the people responsible for the list and, in particular, for Watchmen’s inclusion, was Sophie’s husband Lev). 

To discuss the book, Sophie and Jonty are joined by Andy Miller - writer, performer and one-half of the power duo behind the brilliant Backlisted podcast. In fact, when we asked Andy to come on the show and what book he wanted to do, Watchmen was the first thing he said.  

In this episode, Andy, Sophie and Jonty discuss how Watchmen predicted the 21st Century, changed the shape of comics and literature, and why Alan Moore can’t stand the term 

‘graphic novel’. 

BOOKS REFERRED:  

Watchmen (1986-7) by Alan Moore

Providence (2015-17) by Alan Moore

Jerusalem (2016) by Alan Moore

Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1991) by Art Spiegelman 

The Dark Knight Returns (1986) by Frank Miller 

American Psycho (1991) by Bret Easton Ellis 

Paradise Lost (1667) by John Milton 

Tristram Shandy (1767) by Laurence Sterne

The Prisoner (TV series) (1967-8)

Revelations In the Wink of An Eye (2024) by Jeffrey Lewis 

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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 shopping catalogue can relieve the pathos of the moment. 

In this episode, Sophie and Jonty make amends for slaughtering Boxer the carthorse in their episode on Animal Farm with a celebration of their favourite pets in literature. We make the case that the early 18th Century was the Golden Age for Pet Lit, that Dickens was so masterful at characterisation even the animals in his books are unforgettable, that Jane Austen was - on the basis of her books - no animal lover, while the Bronte sisters very much were. 

Finally, Jonty accidentally uncovers Sophie’s deep, repressed love for Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books. Like a match to gunpowder, just mentioning the books sends Sophie into a long homily to Timmy the dog.  

Note: No animals were harmed in the production of this episode. 

BOOKS DISCUSSED 

My Dog Tulip (1956) by JR Ackerley 

Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939) by TS Eliot

The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) by James Boswell  

Rape of the Lock (1717) by Alexander Pope 

Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat (1747) Thomas Gray 

Jubilate Agno (1759-63) by Christopher Smart 

The Nun’s Priest Tale (1390s) by Geoffrey Chaucer

Oliver Twist (1838) by Charles Dickens 

David Copperfield (1850) by Charles Dickens 

Gulliver’s Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift 

Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Bronte  

The Odyssey  

Sense and Sensibility (1811) by Jane Austen 

Mansfield Park (1814) by Jane Austen 

Five Go To Smuggler’s Top (1945) by Enid Blyton  

Gilead (2004) by Marilynne Robinson 

Rivals (1988) by Jilly Cooper 

The Call of the Wild (1903) by Jack London 

Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) by Truman Capote

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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 Room 101, and - REFORMATION ALERT - take a deep dive into the possible influence of 16th Century theological revolution on Winston Smith’s life (and betrayal). 

Finally, we step away from 1984 to reflect on this Orwell series as a whole: how do we feel about Orwell now, knowing what we do about his life, his triumphs and failures, and the controversy surrounding his treatment of his wife and women in general? 

Books referenced, quoted, or mentioned: 

Orwell: The New Life (2023) by DJ Taylor 

WIFEDOM (2023) by Anna Funder 

The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 (2021) by Dorian Lynskey

Essays by George Orwell

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