Secret Life of Books Podcast Transcripts
Sophie Gee and Jonty Claypole · 191 episodes with transcripts
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.
Spoken has transcripts of 191 Secret Life of Books episodes, with the speakers named. The newest listed here is from October 9, 2026.
Every Secret Life of Books transcript in one script
191 episodes of Secret Life of Books have transcripts. Fetch them all as speaker-labeled Markdown in one script — 1 credit each, and re-fetching one you already have is free:
curl -s -H "x-api-key: YOUR_KEY" \
https://spoken.md/podcasts/1755803199/episodes \
| jq -r '.episodes[] | "\(.id) \(.title)"' \
| while IFS=' ' read -r id title; do
slug=$(echo "$title" | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' | tr -cs 'a-z0-9' '-' | sed 's/-*$//')
[ -f "${id}-${slug}.md" ] && continue
curl -sf -H "x-api-key: YOUR_KEY" \
-o "${id}-${slug}.md" \
https://spoken.md/transcripts/$id || rm -f "${id}-${slug}.md"
sleep 0.34
doneAlready-saved files are skipped — safe to re-run after a top-up.
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Latest Secret Life of Books transcripts
Small-talk emergency kit: who the heck is Anne Carson?
October 9, 2026
Sophie Gee (0:03)
Jonty, we're in another of our Secret Life of Books code-read situations. There's breaking news out of Oslo last night.
Jonty Claypole (0:11)
I wouldn't say it's a life or death situation, Sophie, but I think it's more code amber rather than code red.
Sophie Gee (0:18)
Speak for yourself.
I think the awardee of this prize, judging by the title of her most famous book, would disagree because we're speaking about Anne Carson having been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature last night. What we've got for you is an Anne Carson cheat sheet to get you through dinner parties and other culture gatherings…
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Any Secret Life of Books episode comes back as Markdown with the speakers named, one credit each.
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