'Although he was a brave and noble warrior, he did not often slay his own friends while drunk'. In this episode, Sophie and Jonty dive deep into the manosphere - aka Anglo-Saxon England - to look at one of foundational stones of English literature (although you need a bilingual dictionary to read it in the original). Composed sometime around the 8th Century CE, but not written down until much later, Beowulf is a nostalgic evocation of the north Germanic roots of the Anglo-Saxons. It recounts the adventures of the eponymous hero, who sails south from somewhere in modern-day Sweden to make his name by butchering monsters and telling everyone how great he is.

In the first adventure, Beowulf defeats a terrible monster called Grendel who is preventing the Danes from enjoying their mead at night. He succeeds - only to provoke the wrath of Grendel's much more fearsome mother. But in the end, she too is no match for our hero. Smash cut to fifty years later and Beowulf embarks on his last adventure to defeat a dragon who is terrorising his own people, the Geats.

Sophie and Jonty situate the Anglo-Saxons as a society, dissect Old English poetic forms, share highlights from the poem, make a total dogs dinner of pronouncing Anglo-Saxon names, and speculate what is really going on behind the carnage. They look at the influence of Beowulf in the works of JRR Tolkien, who took the concepts of Middle Earth, dragon lairs and Golem straight out of this poem. They ALSO look at its influence on - surprise reveal - Toni Morrison, who found Grendel's Mother far more interesting than Beowulf himself.

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To close out our poopular series on the great American novelist Toni Morrison, SLOB brings listeners a wonderful discussion with the novelist and Harvard literature Professor Namwali Serpell. Namwali is in the middle of book tour, having just published her highly acclaimed book of essays, "On Morrison," which garnered national and international attention for offering new ways to read and appreciate one of America's most important writers.

"On Morrison" is based on a class Namwali has been teaching for several years to her undergraduates at Harvard, in which they read many of Morrison's novels over the course of a single semester. In this conversation we talk about why Toni Morrison's novels became instant classics, why it really matters that her writing is often so difficult, what Namwali's experiences teaching Morrison in the classroom shows us about how we can address the reading crisis around the world, and how (as ever) classic literature especially offers us crucial ways forward.

Namwali Serpell, "On Morrison."

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Beloved, published in 1987, was Toni Morrison’s fifth novel and instantly seen to be an all-time landmark of American literature, winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Sophie and Jonty continue their Morrison series by asking what makes Beloved so original, how the novel sets out to depict Black experience as never before, and - a favourite topics on SLOB – what, really, is the ‘ghost’ that haunts the household in this novel?

Beloved was inspired by the true story of the Margaret Garner, a woman who escaped slavery in 1857. On being captured, Garner killed her young daughter to save her from a life of enslavement. At the time the story was a mainstream media sensation, used by abolitionists and pro-slavery voices alike. But in Morrison’s extraordinary retelling it becomes a deep, rich, hard to decipher tale of African-American lives and inner experiences of love, grief, pain and joy from the Middle Passage into the late nineteenth century. 

Set mostly in 1873, with numerous flashbacks, Beloved tells the stories of the inhabitants of 124 Bluestone Road in Cincinnati, Ohio. A mother, her lover, her daughter, a ghost and a mysterious woman called Beloved who appears in the home of the protagonist Sethe and her daughter Denver. Through the novel we piece together the backstories of the characters and the impact of slavery on their lives. Morrison wrote that one intention in the book was to ‘make the slave experience intimate’. To achieve this she reinvents literary Modernism and African-American autobiography, with a novel that is uncompromising, frequently horrifying, and very beautiful. 

Readings referred to in this episode:

Toni Morrison, "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature."

___ "The Site of Memory."

Namwali Serpell, On Morrison, Hogarth Press, 2026.

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It’s Oscars week!

The golden statues will get dished out on Sunday evening in Los Angeles and the world will be watching. Literary classics are big, yet again. Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein and Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet have received multiple nominations, and Jesse Buckley has already won BAFTA and Golden Globe for her performance as Anges, aka Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife.

Where do new adaptations and retellings leave the literary originals? Is the rage for reinterpretations revealing that books matter the most, or replacing books with easier, more exciting consumables?

For lovers of Hamnet, does Hamlet still matter and if so, why? Does yet another adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, this time starring Jacob Elordi, the glowed-up Darcified Heathcliff of Emereld Fennell’s recent “Wuthering Heights,” give us new insights? Or does Shelley’s masterpiece sink beneath the icy polar seas of the Hollywood publicity machine, even as Elordi’s new version of the monster is unsinkable?

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As part of our series on the writing of Toni Morrison we’re lucky enough to record a conversation with one of the world’s leading Toni Morrison scholars, Professor Autumn Womack. Autumn has spent more time with the Morrison Papers at Princeton University than pretty much anyone else – except (maybe) Morrison herself.

Autumn describes the experience of coming to Morrison’s writing for the first time in high school, returning to it years later to her as a graduate student and finally getting to teach Morrison's novels at Princeton, where Morrison spent the last years of her writing life. We hear about the fire that nearly destroyed all Morrison's records, and the librarians who saved her papers.

Autumn explains why archives are anything but boring – and how some discoveries she and her students made can change the way we read Morrison’s great novels.

More about Autumn and her work

https://english.princeton.edu/people/autumn-womack

An essay Autumn mentions: “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation” (1984)

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Song of Solomon (1977) propelled Toni Morrison into mainstream recognition as a major American writer, not just of her own generation but all generations, past present and to come. Song tackled something close to the “whole” of African American history, weaving multi-generational stories that included Africa itself, the southern landscapes of plantation slavery and the Civil War, and the post-abolition north. It’s a family chronicle, focusing on the life story of the well-to-do Macon Dead III, aka “Milkman,” who grows from boy to man in 1930s and 40s Michigan. The book brilliantly combines mythology, history, domestic and magical realism. 

Song of Solomon quickly became famous, expressing a growing awareness among American readers in the late 1970s that the Black civil rights movement of the past 3 decades was, at best, a partial success. One of Morrison’s signature qualities was to focus on writing about Black characters for Black readers, in ways that moved beyond the tropes, devices and storylines that white readers could understand and that previous generations of Black writers had been able to immerse themselves in, 

In this episode, the second in our series on the great Nobel Laureate, we continue the story of how Morrison disrupted virtually all existing expectations about how a Black woman novelist would sound. In Song of Solomon she chose a male protagonist to retell a deep history of African cultural magic, annexing the names, stories and language of the Christian Bible to create a story that refuses to do anything that readers of other American retellings of biblical epics were expecting.

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With all the fuss and fanfare around Wuthering Heights, we’re worried Emily Bronte is getting more than her fair share of attention. So today we shift the SLOB-light to her younger sister Anne, author of the remarkable The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, published in 1848. Anne wrote it in a whirlwind after the successes of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, determined to prove herself a Bronte in talent and spirit.

And though Anne is now the least celebrated of the Bronte trio, Tenant at the time of its publication it was considered the most shocking in the Bronte collective oevre. Anne had fearlessly pulled back the veil on marital infidelity, domestic violence, alcoholism, and the systemic torments of Victorian masculinity and marriage laws.

Listeners will spot fascinating overlaps with many of the key scenes and motifs in Emily’s and Charlotte’s writing — like the fact Lord Huntingdon, the violent villain of Tenant, shares his initial with Heathcliff; that he sometimes bears an odd resemblance to Mr. Rochester, and that Wildfell Hall itself has the same initials as Wuthering Heights. But Tenant of Wildfell Hall is also uniquely its own creation, and today Sophie and Jonty get to work unpacking what makes it so extraordinary.

To wrap this Bronte mini-series up we ask, should Tenant of Wildfell Hall be classed as peak Bronte, the equal of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre? And should Emerald Fennell be making Tenant the next stop on her raunchy, irreverent period adaptation-spree?

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A special bonus episode about the blockbuster phenom of Jane Austen’s 250th Birthday celebrations. Sophie’s guest is Professor Devoney Looser, one of the world’s leading Austen scholars, and the author of the brilliant Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane, about the unscripted, occasionally unhinged world that Jane Austen really knew, and which influenced her writing.

We talk about why the Austen obsession has only gone from strength to strength, and Devoney looks ahead to Austenmania in 2026, with new screen adaptations coming to delight the fans.

Get the Book:

Devoney Looser, Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane, St Martin’s Press, 2025.

More fun coverage:

From Alexandra Schwartz, a SLOB guest, in the New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/newsletter/the-daily/jane-austens-uncommon-compassion

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/12/16/books/jane-austen-250th-birthday.html

Listen to our episode about Mrs. Dalloway with Alex Schwartz

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Best Valentine’s Day ever! SLOB’s “Wuthering Heights” watch-party. Sophie and Jonty take it character by character – inanimate characters included — to decide who are the winners and who are the losers in the Fennell-Robbie-Elordi mash-up adaptation of Emily Bronte’s novel. And in the episode’s gripping second half they move onto the really meaty questions: race, class, sex, domestic violence, and pets.

As the movie poster says, Come Undone - with SLOB - this Valentine's season.

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The storm clouds are gathering in anticipation of the Valentine’s Day release of Emerald Fennell’s raunchy film adaptation of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. The film has been described by one critic as “very horny, very sumptuous, and very demented.” Margot Robbie looks set to change the way we read this beloved classic, well, if not forever, for a few weeks during awards season.

It’s fair to say that anyone remotely connected to the world of classic literature is standing by, getting ready to jeer.

And it’s also fair to say that the film has propelled Wuthering Heights to become the most read classic of 2026. The New York subway, the London Tube and many other transport systems worldwide are dotted with earnest young people, proudly nose-deep in their Penguin Wuthering Heights.

If SLOB has a motto, it’s be prepared. To ready our devoted listeners for the big V. Day release, we’ve recorded a brand-new episode on Wuthering Heights. Emily Bronte’s novel, which may just be the most unhinged, genre-busting, unputdownable classic in English, is back, bigger, better, and balmier than when SLOB recorded our first episode back at the very beginning of this podcast.

We drink deep, but always with our trademark cheeky humor, in Emily Bronte’s biography, the secrets behind the book’s writing, and why the Heathcliff-Catherine love-story it is most definitely not GOATED, as the kids say.

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Sophie talks to Richard Ovenden, OBE, the 25th Bodley’s Librarian at Oxford, about the manuscript of Frankenstein, one of the most extraordinary, and fascinating, literary treasures of all time. Richard is head of Oxford’s Bodleian, as well as the University's libraries, museums, and even botanical gardens. Though Richard isn’t personally dusting off the attic vases or planting the bulbs, he does still spend huge amounts of time with rare books and manuscripts.

In this thrilling bonus episode he talks about how the Bodleian came to own the manuscript of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, along with the large, fascinating, and often very weird collection gathered from the Shelley family and their friends over several generations.

This is an amazing behind-the-scenes look at what goes on in the world’s great libraries, why old books really matter, and why SLOB was right all along that Percy Bysshe Shelley is bad news.

To see the manuscript, go to the Digital Bodleian: https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/53fd0f29-d482-46e1-aa9d-37829b49987d/

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