The Common Reader
Nerdy literature newsletter. Helping you make the most of your reading. Click to read The Common Reader, by Henry Oliver, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.
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2026 144
- Who speaks the first line of Pride and Prejudice?
- Let me have war, say I.
- AI consciousness and fictional characters
- A brief reply to Ed West about reading
- Nothing is Boring in America
- Such as she was, such as she would become.
- Larkin’s Anthology. An Extract from Dana Gioia’s New Catalogue.
- James Marriott and the Death of Civilization
- John Locke: the Playful Philosopher
- Sublimation in Middlemarch
- AI will be much better than you at doing taxes or whatever, but there’s no point in having it read Tolstoy for you
- A Slumber did my Spirit Seal, by William Wordsworth
- The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
- Rather Better Pasturage for Their Cows
- Before the ripened field the reapers stand
- Tolkien in Poets’ Corner
- My plea to English students.
- There is no such thing as a ‘text’, and if there were it would degrade literature to be treated as one.
- My new essay about Samuel Johnson
- Can phones explain PISA?
- AI and the future of the humanities
- What is literary criticism if it is not close reading? Art, Magic, and Common Sense.
- Will the end of reading be the end of democracy too?
- Finding Emily
- Philip Hensher: How Can You Kill a Book Like That?
- Some Like It Hot
- Maria Edgeworth and Adam Smith
- Hegel and ‘Life of M’
- Gender parity in fiction writing?
- Replacing Orwell with Anna Funder is part of a bigger problem on the OCR A-level syllabus
- Life of M, by Rachel Cusk
- Submerged memory: C.S. Lewis and the art of forgetting
- Nothing is Boring. Arnold Bennett's Self Help
- Quests in the Golden Bowl
- Why we still read novels
- The Gables of Elsinor
- Modernist Gothic in Copenhagen
- Literature as Part of Life
- Smash, bang, and civilization
- Don't extend UK copyright. It will tax the arts and reduce creativity.
- The Beauty Revival?
- The ordinary sublime of the American diner
- Elizabeth Bowen: as good as Henry James
- Does it matter if you don't like the characters?
- Manuel M. Novillo interviews me
- Homer Haunted, by Henry Power
- My review of Nolan's Odyssey in GQ Australia
- No Spanish reading crisis?
- The Odyssey is about sons questing for their fathers.
- Et in Arcadia Ego
- Citizen Kane, Orson Welles
- Will Imagination be the Key to Thriving in the Age of AI?
- America Should Love Itself Again
- The 2026 Hyperstition Unslop AI fiction writing contest
- Is an English degree good preparation to become Prime Minister?
- Perpetual Summer in the "feminine middlebrow"
- How to write a take-down
- Two poets talk about the stock market
- A.R. Ammons and arts patronage
- Who was America's Homer?
- Memorising Shakespeare's sonnets
- Was Mill anti-traditional?
- Childhood days, lemonade, romance
- Disclosure Day
- Marilyn, Transcendence, Durham, Novels, Dulles, Amis, Proust, Lost Lambs
- Gordon Wood Reading Proust
- What it is like to daydream about Proust
- Should there be a Library of Britain?
- Zena Hitz: Gulliver's Travels and the Failures of Human Understanding
- What it is like to read Proust
- Oscillating at the zoo
- Something understood. How to read poetry.
- The literary world needs to wake up!
- To vex the world. Jonathan Swift’s Frustrated Humor
- What should be on a list of almost Great Books?
- Bull Run, butterflies, Jeep Cat, prom
- You have no idea how many legends have walked these halls and what’s worse, you don’t care.
- He says the early petal-fall is past
- The link between art and life
- Loved, Jefferson, Exile, Hermit, Brontë
- Oliver Traldi: Jane Austen and the Defence of Virtue
- Growling in a corner: Samuel Johnson’s lost years
- A.A. Milne's crossword-puzzle heart in the Hundred Acre Wood
- Out of all the indifferences
- Palms, poems, moderns
- The Whitsun Weddings, Philip Larkin
- The Stranger, The Drama, and the criticism of Ben Lerner
- The New Dark Ages: James Marriott in conversation with Henry Oliver
- Steaming manholes, dolphins, and burnt-out houses
- wisdom through the awful grace of God
- The Clock in the Forest
- The Future of Reading, the Honest Broker, and Michel Houellebecq
- Spring-time, night-time, rabbits and raccoons
- Finishing Buddenbrooks
- The Man Who Read Everything
- Just give Helen DeWitt some money
- Buddenbrooks, a masterwork of business and real life. A novel to love and live with.
- Teaching poetry to LDS students raised on the KJV
- How to memorise poetry
- Prayer (I), George Herbert
- Love Calls us to the Things of This World
- Laura Thompson on Agatha Christie: Shakespeare, Murder, and the Art of Simplicity
- Old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.
- Hating Dostoevsky
- The Wealth of Nations is a classic of English Literature
- Larkin's trees
- Poems Beautiful and Useful
- Ruth Scurr: The Life and Work of John Aubrey
- Through the carnage I moved with a callous composure.
- Do more people write poetry than read it?
- Further thoughts on some of the topics from my 'Conversation with Tyler'
- 250 years of The Wealth of Nations
- My appearance on Conversations with Tyler
- Naomi Kanakia: How Great Are the Great Books?
- C19th English novels overrated?
- The night cometh
- Lázár, Pound, Kees, Lavoie, Smith, Shklovsky, Fantastic, England, Updike
- How to rate Bloomsbury?
- My true love hath my heart
- George Steiner breaking my heart with his description of the way people used to memorise poems, Bible passages, classic works.
- Elizabeth Bowen on Jane Austen's Englishness
- The Liberal Spirit of Literary Criticism
- How Francis Bacon read books
- Underground aliens and the future of humanity in 1871
- Pricks, Devils, and Phlegm. John Aubrey and the Fertile Facts of English Biography.
- Are books and babies compatible?
- Doomed to choose...
- Fierce, wild, intractability. Emily Brontë's untameable spirit
- Twenty-one reactions to Wuthering Heights
- Confederate flags and Shenandoah's timelessness
- How Naomi Kanakia read the Great Books
- Hermione Lee: Tom Stoppard. “It’s Wanting to Know That Makes Us Matter”
- Ice storm
- HENRY JAMES. Plus: Small, Engines, Fairies, Wardrobe, Measure, Mirth, Life, Weird, Affinities
- Come and be my intern (to talk about J.S. Mill)
- Andrew Gelman reviews Erin Somers
- Good letters made good men. Why should we kick against the Pricks, when we can walk on Roses?
- Democracy, by Henry Adams
- Bacon, Swift, Smith: Three anniversaries in 2026
- Driving like a video game
- Literature, politics, and the future of the humanities
- An economist asks: What is the value of reading great literature like Eliot and Tolstoy?
- What should Tyler Cowen ask me?
- Ten reasons to read great literature in 2026
2025 245
- Year in review, 2025
- What do we owe each other once we become different sorts of people?
- No paywall, anywhere
- High performers are late bloomers
- The books I enjoyed most this year, 2025.
- Kiran Desai: catching a glimpse in the forest
- Cat, Soutine, Feeling, Happiness, Conservative, Enigma
- John Carey: the Common Reader’s Professor
- Cymbeline book club
- Why we love Jane Austen more than ever after 250 years
- John Mullan. What makes Jane Austen great?
- Seamus Heaney: a jobber among shadows.
- Hamnet, the movie
- 2025 was a very good year for literary writing on Substack
- SHAME! SHAME! LET CHILDREN READ BOOKS!
- Is it unliterary to oppose AI?
- Persuasion book club
- Pope's contempt
- Jane Austen's first biographer
- Stoppard and chemotherapy
- Tom Stoppard's Ordinary Magic
- E.B. Whiter than White
- How English prose made progress
- Rebecca Lowe: the container theory of time in On the Calculation of Volume
- Elitism is good
- On the Calculation of Volume, vol. III
- What’s the best fiction you have read this year?
- Secret Squirrel writes about Alice Munro
- Why Europe got rich, and China didn't
- My interview with G.K. Allum
- Robed as Destinies: Magna Carta, Thomas Jefferson, and bobblehead Nixon.
- Coriolanus book club
- A response about Adam Kelly's new sincerity
- On Liberalism, Cass Sunstein
- Autumn by V.S. Naipaul
- New Sincerity by Adam Kelly
- Literature seminars you can join online
- I love you and I'm not an artist
- How long until AI writes a great poem?
- What does the Pursuit of Happiness mean?
- Reading Shakespeare in the army.
- The poem within the poem
- A simple test for developing taste
- Is writing for AI the future of writing?
- Peter Pan video
- The secret to having a hero
- Emma book club
- Your Name Here
- The American art of being busy.
- The Ten Year Affair, by Erin Somers
- Did Austen's readers associate the name Mansfield with slavery?
- Shanon Chamberlain: what is a novel?
- Is Mansfield Park about slavery?
- Who are the most eclectic readers?
- "If literary fiction is a corpse, it’s a wonderfully animated one."
- Annie Hall
- Macbeth book club
- Ignore the pessimists — we are living through a literary golden age
- "The Professor’s House" Centenary
- Margaret Thatcher: late bloomer
- What I Learned from Reading Peter Pan to my Children.
- Venture Capital and the Revenge of the Liberal Arts
- The Graffiti in the Cathedral. A Very Victorian Stunt.
- Literature can't save you.
- Macbeth's brief candle
- Shakespeare’s mothers. The Countess in All's Well That Ends Well.
- Who will win the Nobel Prize for literature, 2025?
- You can read Shakespeare. Here's how.
- The writer’s break.
- Vertigo in Austin
- Waiting for some great sign. Minor Black Figures
- My interview with Sam Khan
- Mansfield Park book club
- What does reading for pleasure mean?
- Rhodri Lewis: Shakespearean Tragedy
- Does anyone even know whether students can still read a lot?
- Adam Smith's Burkean view of social cohesion
- Children need more reading time, education needs less politics
- Shakespeare’s Tragic Art
- The online humanities revival continues apace
- Misusing Mill's ideas to advocate for assisted suicide
- Denmark exceeds Lilliput
- The Sound of Music's 60th anniversary: a masterpiece that celebrates civilization.
- How the CIA secretly funded Encounter
- All's Well That Ends Well book club
- Serialized novel competition on Substack
- Philistines want German schools to stop teaching Goethe.
- Vanity and productivity in Smith and the Irish Enlightenment
- Video of my discussion with Catherine Lacey about Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea
- Live with Catherine Lacey TODAY 16.00 East Coast Time
- Common readers with good taste
- Irish Enlightenment notes
- How to improve students' reading ability
- Why read Middlemarch if you work in D.C.?
- Austen letter for sale, and rare copy of Emma
- Liberties is hiring an Assistant Publisher
- Swift's contribution to progress
- The New Yorker is already writing to an algorithm
- Culture matters more than politics
- When ad hominem attacks are justified
- Captains and colonels in Adam Smith and Jane Austen
- Read the Gospels in September!
- Why read in the age of AI?
- Does prose fiction count as literature?
- Chimney swifts on Labour Day
- An aesthete of controversy. Who was William F. Buckley?
- Who left the lid off the cookie jar?
- How to be a liberal in revolutionary times.
- High wages in the American Colonies
- Celine Nguyen is an Emerging Critics Fellow for the National Book Critics Circle
- At the pool
- Literature and politics
- Noah Smith doesn't read literary fiction
- Cigarettes in the pharmacy
- Mitt Romney at the intersection
- Will tax cuts create more readers?
- Jonathan Swift in the mattress store
- Everything Flaubert did, Jane Austen did first.
- At the Arlington laundromat
- Arlington travel notes
- Told by an Idiot
- The 25 best British and Irish novels of the 21st century?
- Sweet Thames run softly while I sing my song
- No more paid writing here
- The Mary Pages, by Sally Read
- Talking about taste
- What is the Odyssey about?
- Willa Cather's case for reading the great books
- Literature is calling you to put down your phone.
- What is spite?
- Why is Rear Window so tense?
- Mrs Warren's Profession. A splendid play performed almost pefectly.
- I'm joining a fellowship at the Mercatus Centre.
- Shakespeare's Characters and the Wheel of Fire
- A typical witch and a life of one's own.
- The life of Samuel Johnson's servant
- ‘The Old Man and the Sea has the EMPTIEST sea in all of LITERATURE’
- Wordsworth: To Sleep
- Rates of pay for newsletter writers in the sixteenth century
- What makes you a classical liberal?
- Herrick: To Daffodils
- Will people enjoy AI art?
- Frances Wilson: T.S. Eliot is stealing my baked beans.
- The case for literary optimism
- Twenty-five facts about the Merchant of Venice
- How long until they can read your mind? Be thine own palace, or the world's thy jail...
- Northanger Abbey and the critics
- Arnold Bennett's ten step plan for learning to appreciate poetry
- What works of the humanities should undergraduates read?
- George Eliot and the Reform of England
- What was the gothic revival?
- Victoria Moul. Poetry for life.
- Boswell as Lydia Davis?
- Boys, Flesh, Christie, Hours, Trollope, Diana, Perfection, audiobooks
- Jane Austen’s Rake Problem
- Lamorna Ash. Don't Forget We're Here Forever
- Splendidly wicked vice in Jane Austen
- T.S. Eliot and the Whitsun fire
- Northanger Abbey book club
- What questions should writers ask?
- Shakespeare's experiments in King John
- My appearance on the Year of Bach podcast
- My favourite works and recordings of J.S. Bach
- A whole new way of reading Jane Austen?
- The humanities help us find the people we want to know.
- His positions all sounded so much less stable than I had remembered
- Did Shakespeare crib from Dante?
- Twenty-two facts about King John
- Virginia Woolf's other centenary
- George Eliot's intellectual life
- Helen Castor: imagining life in the fourteenth century.
- Jane Austen, worldly philosopher.
- King John book club
- Literature is so back.
- Which sermon did Mr. Collins read by the fire?
- How Muriel Spark became a late bloomer
- What to do about the decline of the humanities.
- Austen, Hating the Odyssey, Rooney and politics, Explaining Howl, Becoming Christian, Gilgamesh, Naipaul, Bradstreet, Shakespeare and maths, Panpyschism
- Adam Smith's impartial spectator
- You make your own luck.
- Start here.
- Thirty-one facts about Richard II
- RIP Jane Gardam
- The superiority of Studio Ghibli—over Disney and over AI slop.
- Clare Carlisle: George Eliot's Double Life.
- Richard II book club
- Proto, Lantana, Arcana, Mobius, Velasco, Uchida
- Is this AGI? (Not quite, I think...)
- Middlemarch is a novel about sympathising with everyone.
- Matt Yglesias: reading books makes me feel calmer.
- If men want to get published again, they need to write great novels.
- Sense and Sensibility is a quest narrative
- On the Calculation of Volume, Solvej Balle
- Sense and Sensibility book club
- Jane Austen's alternative endings.
- Why I hate Wuthering Heights
- What’s my thing?
- Twenty-one facts (and opinions) about A Midsummer Night's Dream.
- Katherine Dee. Finding life where others don't.
- Midsummer Night's Dream book club
- Evelyn Waugh's Decadent Redemption
- Shakespeare's first tipping point
- Rachel Herrington is reading the St. Johns curriculum. You can join her.
- How to get started reading English literature.
- Frost, AI, Classics, Eliot, Taste, Love, Emre, Schiller, Slop, Orfeo, Wright, Aphantasia, Lists, Leopard
- Books for ambitious 14-17 year old students?
- Agnes Callard: what is the value of fiction?
- What does pride mean in Pride and Prejudice?
- How to read the opening of a novel
- Will AI have a taste all of its own?
- Spark, Proto, Hum.
- Twenty-five facts about The Comedy of Errors
- The lives of the authors.
- The twenty best English poets
- Comedy of Errors Book Club
- The funeral bus.
- Mr. Bennet and the mischief of neglect
- Nelson, patronage, and meritocracy
- Pride and Prejudice book club
- AI and the future of literature.
- Read more, Generations, Hill, Post-feminist Austen, Marketing Tolstoy, Delve, Book Tok, Close Reading, Anthology, Reverse Engineering, AI firms, Publishing, Sontag, Who Cares?, Serious Joke Poems
- Pride and Poverty? Lizzy Bennet's financial prospects.
- Founders over fifty.
- Shakespeare the economist.
- Does Jane Austen hate you?
- Natasha Joukovsky: literature, capitalism, and Jane Austen.
- Does the flame of genius burn past 30?
- Richard III: a close reading
- Literary culture can't just dismiss AI.
- Why is Harry Potter quite so influential?
- Richard III Book Club
- A place where knowledge is ours for the taking.
- Twenty-nine facts about Richard III
- Shakespeare's stirring world.
- Is Atlas Shrugged the new vibe?
- A short defence of gossip
- Wicked King, Mozart: performance and posterity, Women detectives, Midwinter wood, Henry V, Venture Capital, Annihilation, Neverwhere, Enchanted Glass
- How good is AI at literary criticism?
- Late bloomers, Holmes' copyright shame, Guinness Magi, Unphilosophical living, Scott revival?, Context Collapse.
- Is the Baroness in The Sound of Music a Nazi?
- Austen saved me from social media
- Seventieth anniversaries. 1955 was a very good year.
- Reading Jane Austen
- Jane Austen Schedule 2025
- Tyler Cowen: Trump's DOGE team should read Shakespeare.
2024 180
- Year in review, 2024
- Judi Dench is honest about acting
- Christmas, science, context, suicide, E.B. White, Bear, Piranesi, James, reading, epigraphs?, Murdoch, selfish, X, smells, Potter, gpt philosophy, PhD, rating Austen, American fantasy?, Art job
- Brandon Taylor: I want to bring back all of what a novel can do.
- How Prospero repents.
- Book Club 2025
- Shakespeare Schedule 2025
- The rareness of good readers?
- The books I enjoyed most this year, 2024.
- How I learned to love literary criticism.
- Death, Sociology, Crime, Knowledge, Jargon, Novels, Men
- J.R.R. Tolkien the poet in search of lost time.
- Poetry Book Club SUNDAY 19.00 UK TIME
- Unstylish style in Vanity Fair.
- Rundell, Ibsen, Gogh, Yoshida, Tanizaki, Atwood, Dolan, Bate, Chaucer, Orbital, Liberalism, Future, Monsters, Justice, Autism, Ass
- Zena Hitz: reading the Great Books
- Nelson in the Arctic. Polar bears, geese, and filled breeches.
- Can the philistine supremacy be stopped?
- Context Collapse is a very bad poem.
- Learning to love. How the poet Dana Gioia discovered his vocation through music.
- Coriolanus, literary theory, bad fiction, literary utility, Grimms, shelves, Public humanities, dead novels, fictional therapy, Where is our Milton of the space age?, Austen's sisters, AI art
- AUTUMN SALE 25% OFF FOREVER
- Can fiction improve you?
- Marion Turner: Chaucer's world
- Influences in Nelson's early career
- An Inkling defends The Winter's Tale
- Children deserve Shakespeare, not teachers who promote ignorance.
- Winter's Tale, Tempest Book Club
- We wander in illusions.
- Twenty-five facts about The Winter's Tale
- Shakespeare's experiments.
- Notes towards an applied literature
- What is good dialogue?
- Politics, Oliver Sacks, Proust, Korea, Clutter, Levy, Psalms, Earnings, Status
- Naomi Kanakia: How Great are the Great Books?
- How real should fiction be?
- Troilus' godly jealousy.
- Horatio Nelson: The Darling Hero of England
- The Real Thing? Stoppard at the Old Vic
- The Moon, Sixpence, and Sally Rooney
- How Shakespeare turned Plutarch into poetry
- Catherine Lacey: internet geography
- Troilus & Cressida, Antony& Cleopatra Night Book Club
- “You can never be wise until you learn to love reading.”
- What good is the New York Times?
- Visionary madness, Godless novels!?, Modernism’s cultural drift, Is culture stuck?, Complicated Odysseus, Can't read: won't read, Knausgaard and Scott and good bad writing, BBC bathos, Towards Zero
- Writing advice is a lie.
- The untold life of Helen Taylor
- What are the best works of literature about business and capitalism?
- Neurodiversity and normal people in Intermezzo.
- 'We know what we are.' Mating: a romance of rationalism and pragmatism.
- MAGGIE SMITH RIP
- The Millstone, by Margaret Drabble
- SALLY ROONEY
- DeWitt, Rooney, Tolstoy and Gary Kemp, Is Culture Dying?, Against Re-reading, The New Sincerity, Death, World Literature 1600, Cecil the beagle, Totoro, Good Bad Taste
- The Reader’s Quest. How literature helps us find meaning and understand the world.
- The Romantic philosopher
- But tell me true, are you not mad indeed?
- Tonight's Live Video
- Nabeel Qureshi: literature requires the fuller engagement of your soul.
- Vote for the GOAT British novelist
- Trivialising ourselves to death.
- Goethe, James, Evenings, Writing, Hitler, Elites, Serotonin, Piranesi, Breath, Elmet, Angel, Gilead
- How networks really work.
- Hamlet & Twelfth Night Book Club
- Predicting the wrong ending.
- Who is the best British novelist?
- Why Ted Chiang was wrong
- Waiting your way to the top. Dwight Eisenhower's slow career.
- The busyness of Hamlet
- Is Substack awful?
- Hollis Robbins: literature makes you a mind reader
- Who's afraid of reading books?
- Harold Bloom in Silicon Valley
- Catcher in the Rye, How to Read, Arsy-versy, Pope Francis, AI Cheating, Austen and abolition, Diaries in the 1560s, Conrad, highcounterculture, handwriting, memorising poetry, Graves vs Milton, Lewis
- Revisiting Larkin.
- Twenty seven facts about Hamlet
- Why can't AI write a great novel?
- London's best secret art gallery
- Poetry Book Club TODAY 19.00 UK TIME
- James Marriott. The value of being pretentious and the importance of the emotions to the intellect.
- Elites need to be honest about highbrow culture
- Can fiction succeed on Substack? How serialised novels can work with modern technology.
- Here's a simple solution to the pessimism culture. Read a book.
- Was Shakespeare gay?
- A.N. Wilson. Walking in mysteries.
- Will AI create a new creative renaissance?
- No, Taylor Swift is not Mary Shelley
- Shakespeare club update
- Why I read children's books
- Be serious, Mother reader, Critic friend, AI, Franchise, Mozart, Moby Dick, War and Peace, Internet novels
- Impossible Creatures, by Katherine Rundell
- The biographer's morality
- Why rage against a good night?
- The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien
- The modern discourse novel
- Lolita is not a moral test
- Give me leave to speak my mind
- The Clerk's Tale and the expectation of astonishment
- Ireland rejected James Joyce. Did he reject it back?
- As You Like It Book Club
- I met a fool in the forest
- Baliol Holloway, forgotten Shakespearean actor
- Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare
- The unlikely similarity of J.S. Mill and Samuel Johnson.
- How to Read a Poem: division, allegory, ambiguity, irony
- Why I write the Common Reader
- Shakespeare and the Poets' War
- On Civilization
- Festivals, debuts, syntax, and Kafka
- Deep, still, seeable. Seamus Heaney's letters.
- When life is too much like a pathless wood
- Ten of the best books about late bloomers and late blooming talent
- Did Shakespeare chose not to think in Much Ado About Nothing?
- How Shakespeare rehearsed
- International Booker
- Much Ado Book Club
- Is the plain style the same as minimalism?
- The plain style or the ornate?
- What made the Inklings a significant literary group?
- Nineteen facts about Much Ado About Nothing
- Launch day for Second Act!
- Levy discourse, Is Milton any good!? lol, Nigerian lit crit, Luther, Bluestockings, Pompeii, Mothers, Liberty, prosody
- Fifty late bloomers
- On Imitation
- Helen Vendler and the Recognition of Black Poetry.
- Andrew Lang and the catawampus of Romance
- Why Falstaff is fat.
- Robert Frost's accidental late start
- Ha ha! Ha ha!, Obituary of a quiet life, Internet culture, Black box, Frost, Shakespeare (3x), Zola and the modern novel, teaching poetry, LLMs
- On Hope
- Patricia Highsmith's womb of her own
- Paul Graham's plain rhetoric
- Shakespeare's breakthrough in Henry IV
- Is Mary Oliver a good poet?
- Sex, madness, and death. Elizabeth Jenkins' overlooked masterpiece.
- Henry IV book club
- What about the people who never found their calling?
- Who is Falstaff?
- How Penelope Fitzgerald became a late blooming novelist.
- “Unkept Good Fridays”
- Accuracy vs specificity.
- Death, green, boxers, Bluestockings, devil, dragon, Bartleby, Deor
- Two leadership lessons from Shakespeare's Henriad
- Why do we look at photographs
- The soul moved the pen, and broke it.
- What is English meter?
- Who's afraid of A.C. Bradley?
- The life of a common reader
- Knights and Hawkes: inside Shakespeare's dream
- Raye. Revenge of a late bloomer.
- Love's Labour's Lost book club
- Twenty-five ideas about Love's Labour's Lost
- Welcome to the age of the late bloomer
- Late bloomers, Iliad, strategic romance, classic physics, Murdoch v Amis, Swift's grammar, opera boy, long sentences, Hayek/Mill/game theory
- Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be
- How to raise a (happy) genius
- 1791 Mozart's Last Year. H. C. Robbins Landon
- Doppelgänger, by Naomi Klein
- Iris Murdoch, a novelist for now.
- On Advertising.
- Romeo's dark side
- Iris Murdoch's philosophical fiction
- Romeo and Juliet Book Club
- Ely Cathedral and the beauty of progress.
- The limits of mimesis. Seeing Others, by Michèle Lamont. Educated, by Tara Westover.
- What does fiction aim to do?
- Thirty facts about Romeo and Juliet
- On Humour
- How to be a late bloomer
- Airline comedy, Flaubert, the hotness of Jane Eyre, Renaissance book wheels, Taylor Swift, Jane Austen, and a Saxon Psalter.
- Shakespeare's characters
- Noël Coward's Talent to Amuse.
- How to have good taste
- David Brooks and the moral purpose of self-help
- How to read Shakespeare
- Shakespeare Schedule
- Seventieth anniversaries. 1954 in English literature and beyond.
- Magic, Eliot, cherries, fashion, Mozart, Flaubert, whale.
- How Mozart became Mozart
2023 147
- Aiming at something noble. Resolutions for human flourishing.
- Year in Review, 2023
- The books I enjoyed most this year, 2023
- Open Thread: best reading of 2023 and what you're reading this Christmas.
- Tyler Cowen: reading John Stuart Mill
- The Glutton, by A.K. Blakemore
- How Darwin became so persuasive
- When is it acceptable to change historical facts to suit a story?
- Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life.
- How do the most prolific people produce so much?
- John Stuart Mill: the deeper springs of human character
- You are a (partial) Utilitarian, whether you realise it or not.
- Darwin book club tonight 19.00 uk time
- How to Read a Poem: the sonnet
- Why you should read John Stuart Mill's Autobiography.
- Britney Spears and the snake
- Hypertext autobiography, a lifetime of Joyce, chatbots, botox, feuds, Perry nostalgia, and luddites
- Converting to the the religion of the future
- The rise and fall (and rise again) of Shakespeare's First Folio
- The messy theory of history
- Catholics and Colonies
- Katalin Karikó: learning from failure
- The art of the fragment in Lydia Davis
- The religious despair of Sam Bankman-Fried
- Critical essays on those boys are a goddamn dime a dozen
- GOAT. The role of personality in economics.
- Stop ignoring Harriet Taylor. She's the reason liberalism exists.
- Dangerous empathy, slush systems, flowers, a hellcat meme-minter, and an escaped gorilla.
- Details for John Stuart Mill book club
- 35 pieces of practical wisdom from my common place book
- A hanging and flogging sort of liberal. John Stuart Mill's support for the death penalty.
- The new culture will flower on the stem of the old
- What makes Malcolm Gladwell a good writer?
- Hannah Crafts' Dickensian art
- Thoughts on Shakespeare and Sam Bankman-Fried
- Self-direction and talented people
- How to Read a Poem: the lyric
- Discovering cinema
- Auden was the best poet of the twentieth century
- Revisiting Brideshead
- Being wrong about books. How to interpret literature
- Christina Rossetti
- Samuel Johnson, opsimath
- Pygmalion
- Alice in Wonderland. What Nonsense?
- Yellowface, a hypocrite reversed?
- Alice book club details
- Zadie Smith and the revenge of beauty
- Wifedom, by Anna Funder
- Welcome to the Growlery
- What’s the moral of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland?
- Zadie Smith vs E.M. Forster
- Summer Sale, 20% off
- Book Club Schedule
- The Bloomian Merve Emre
- Did the novel die with Dickens?
- 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
- Bleak House and the art of characterisation
- Samuel Johnson, ghost hunter
- Ban all book summaries.
- The Lady of Shalott
- My name is Alfred Hitchcock
- Tennyson book club
- Why I am writing about late bloomers
- Andrew Motion
- Who decided to drop the bomb?
- Tennyson's fame
- There is only one piece of writing advice
- Oppenheimer
- A nineteenth-century reading list
- The Adorable Little World of Don Camillo
- How to win a Victorian culture war
- The Autists, by Clara Törnvall
- Book Club programme. What to read before you die.
- Gaskell Book Club
- How to read the canon
- Bleak House, an obscuring and shadow filled world
- Wren, pulp, fire, algorithms, etc.
- "from Racine to a nurse romance"
- Jane Eyre, Christian feminist
- Education: A Very Short Introduction, by Gary Thomas
- There is no crisis in English Literature
- Happiness research needs a new philosophy
- An Arundel Tomb, a close reading
- How I use chatGPT
- It is time to revive the compound-dash
- The case for reading Great Books
- The nineteenth century idea of literary talent
- The battle-field and the madhouse
- Simplicity is a technique, not a style guide.
- Hamlet: The Motive and the Cue
- Book club zoom link
- Cramming vs curiosity—SATs, J.S. Mill and the secret to original thinking.
- Will ChatGPT fact-check ambiguous political language?
- Book Club Postponement
- David Copperfield Zoom link and Discussion thread
- Parfit, by David Edmonds
- My debate with Robert Cottrell
- Dublin notes
- Against Disney
- Poor fellow! but a humorist in his way.
- Creative non-fiction's moral mistake.
- Eugene Meyer, forgotten elite
- Lichfield notes
- The plain style says one thing but the ornate style says many things.
- Mansfield Park in space: talking prose with Una McCormack
- The Windhover, by Gerard Manley Hopkins
- Gerard Manley Hopkins discussion thread
- Hopkins Book Club Zoom link
- Best of late blooming novelists
- A caterpillar among those mulberry leaves: The future of biography
- The distant sound of the freight train horn
- New York's widening gyre
- The role of luck in success
- What is the role of the humanities in progress?
- Virginia Notes
- Peter Hitchens doesn't understand Charles Dickens
- Agatha Christie: free speech is a copyright issue
- Sometimes bad writing is good writing...
- Make cannons to find meaning
- Like a sprat in a pickle jug.
- Should you hothouse your children or will it make them unhappy?
- My new service as a reading coach
- George Orwell is such splendid entertainment
- The un-difficult novel
- The importance of failures
- One rule for good writing
- What makes a good biography? Explaining the life.
- What makes a good biography? Show the person.
- How reliable are people’s diaries and letters?
- Life on a Leash
- Roald Dahl, King Lear, and sentimental editors
- Excessive bitchery can get out of hand.
- Welcome to the new age of magical thinking
- Frank Lloyd Wright bleg: I'm going to Wisconsin
- Meet me at the Lighthouse
- The messy orangutang
- Balloonmania
- John Stuart Mill and the future of Effective Altruism
- What are the biggest challenges facing adult common readers today?
- A great deal of ruin in a talent
- Just gurus enough to make us hate one another
- Exit Orwell, pursued by a gigantic hound
- The high charms of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
- In which ChatGPT writes a Dickensian scene where Mrs. Gamp meets Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller calls her not a lady.
- With a penny-piece on each eye, and his wooden leg under his left arm
- "Waking this morning out of my sleep on a sudden..."
2022 63
- "One feels a fool when one ostentatiously attacks a quite irreproachable counterpane."
- "How snug England is in the winter."
- "I have yet to find a new home in London."
- Let’s chat about Christmas reading
- The Moon, Sixpence, and Sally Rooney
- Year in Review
- How to write like Malcolm Gladwell
- The books I enjoyed most this year
- When Eisenhower's father died
- Katherine Rundell's anatomy of wonders
- 1825: the first modern financial crisis
- “I can’t remember a single thing I’ve done in that office.”
- Are we contributing to our moral decline every time we turn on Netflix?
- The Great Woman Theory of Vote Leave, Annie Ernaux, Tosca, T.S. Eliot and Hokusai
- What happened to Liz Truss?
- What about Shakespeare as the national epic?
- Finely ordered multiplicity. The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis, by Jason M. Baxter
- Realism and fairy tale in Silas Marner
- In defence of the Great Man Theory of history
- Barnaby Rudge is underrated
- What is a common reader?
- Persuasion should have been called Consequences
- Noah Smith interview
- Make better anthologies
- Auden was the best poet of the twentieth century
- What are the limits on the use of the very best talent?
- Mute, inglorious Vivian Maier
- Philip Larkin. Poet of the almost.
- Anna Gát, startup founder and late bloomer
- The Pachinko Parlour, by Elisa Shua Dusapin
- The Biographies of Westminster Abbey
- The Fortunes of Francis Barber, by Michael Bundock
- Light flashes. John Donne by Katherine Rundell
- Robin Hanson, interview
- The Last Days of Roger Federer, Geoff Dyer
- Mark Landis and the art of freedom
- Homeschool update: your education is your life
- Sarah Harkness, late bloomer
- Have we learnt how to let people leave the royal family?
- Possible endings for The Winter's Tale
- The Biography Conundrum — Was Boswell smarter than Johnson?
- Pachinko, Min Jin Lee
- Recent books: philosophy, people watching, Peanuts, self help
- No Touching, Ketty Rouf
- Helen Lewis interview
- I quit my job to write a book about late bloomers
- Polyrama and the art of character. Shakespeare, Bruegel, Tati.
- Notes on Lydia Davis
- Samuel Johnson and Progress Studies
- Free, by Lea Ypi
- Inside the head of modern, young Russia
- Charles Moore interview
- Six underrated detective novels
- Economics in Sense and Sensibility
- Samuel Johnson: Reading for Wisdom
- Samuel Smiles: late bloomer with a side hustle. Part II
- Samuel Smiles: late bloomer with a side hustle. Part I
- One Pair of Hands, Monica Dickens
- Survey responses
- The secret to being a great writer
- Salon about Elizabeth Jenkins
- Reader Survey
- "She sees visions of the departed, unfortunately too often of the people she most disliked." James Lees-Milne, New Year's Day, 1947
2021 55
- "Very unfavourable the present aspect of public Affairs." New Year's Eve, James Woodeforde, country parson, 1786 & 1796
- Understanding Conversations with Tyler
- New Year's Resolutions with Samuel Johnson
- "We could pay. But what if we could not?" Boxing Day in the Blitz
- "Good content of mind." Christmas Day, 1663: Samuel Pepys
- "A beautifully frosty day." Christmas Eve, 1845: Queen Victoria
- Can culture make progress?
- Prince Albert and Progress Studies
- In praise of homeschooling
- Let absence speak. My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland
- The Rittenhouse Story
- George V and Queen Camilla
- The Fountain Overflows, by Rebecca West
- Elizabeth Jennings and the future of poetry
- Alone with the melancholy fountain for company: Real Estate, Deborah Levy
- Not quite against alcohol
- Let's re-think when the nineteenth century happened
- Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, Elizabeth Taylor
- A Town Called Solace, Mary Lawson
- Was Samuel Johnson a masochist?
- Who will read your emails when you're gone?
- Virginia Woolf and the art of rudeness
- Mansfield Park: the value of marginal people
- Do real artists write schlock?
- Dana Gioia, Studying with Miss Bishop
- Alan Lascelles
- Baliol Holloway, forgotten Shakespearean actor
- Thomas Edison: inventor at work
- Bonar Law, the unappreciated prime minister
- Blithe Spirit, Noël Coward
- What kind of ordinary? The sad but amusing life of A.G.C. Liddell
- Lady in Waiting, Anne Glenconner
- Betty and Patsy, a joint obituary
- Where was Samuel Johnson in 1745?
- A Silent Joy, by Elizabeth Jenkins
- How great was Churchill?
- The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher, by Beatrix Potter
- The biography museum, a proposal
- The Apartment, by Billy Wilder
- Updating Aesop
- Bring back Elizabeth Jenkins
- A Life Discarded, by Alexander Masters
- P.G.Wodehouse's guide to life
- A House in Flanders, by Michael Jenkins
- Let there be more biographies of failures
- Disraeli, man of imagination
- Queen Mary the Misunderstood
- The Tortoise and the Hare
- The case for opsimaths. Maybe late bloomers aren't so late
- Parallel Lives, Phyllis Rose
- Carlyle and how not to live
- Who are the real poets today?
- James Boswell, a wonderful failure
- What is casuistry and how can it make you more rational about politics?
- Blue Ticket, Sophie Macintosh
2020 188
- Against Lytton Strachey
- Good wishes from Samuel Johnson
- J.S. Mill, hopeless romantic
- Carbuncular Karlo Marx
- The value of nearness in fiction and biography
- Why did Wendy Cope start publishing so late?
- Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Thomas De Quincey
- Oddly-angled observation. The Sin Eater, by Alice Thomas Ellis
- Hamnet, Maggie O'Farrell
- The Anthologist, Nicholson Baker
- Earthly Possessions, Anne Tyler
- Samuel Johnson, opsimath
- A Patchwork Planet, Anne Tyler
- 84 Charing Cross Road, film review
- Annie John, Jamaica Kincaid
- Welcome to the Common Reader
- Welcome to The Common Reader
- A Happy Marriage, Rafael Yglesias
- The exasperated spirit. How to read books and why.
- The escape from irony. Scenes from a Marriage and Marriage Story.
- Symposium, Muriel Spark
- Loitering with Intent, Muriel Spark
- Convenience Store Woman. Is Sayaka Murata a reactionary arguing against conservatives? (Plot spoilers, Straussian reading.)
- The Comforters, Muriel Spark
- Evelyn Waugh, Ann Pasternak Slater
- The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro
- The Clerk's Tale and the expectation of astonishment
- The Remains of the Day
- Bartleby the Scrivener, Herman Melville
- What I've been reading
- Being epistemologically complacent, billiard balls, and polarised politically obnoxious culture
- The Milanese Leonardo is easier to find if they are a writer
- Montaigne on post modernism, wokeness etc
- So far on the internet today
- Helen DeWitt, translating Proust, and what is it that you want to do with you one wild and precious life
- The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt
- Lost in Thought, Zena Hitz
- Lightning Rods, Helen DeWitt
- Michelangelo and the Fitzgerald Rule
- How I changed my mind about gay marriage when I worked in Parliament and why I miss the days of David Cameron and calm debate
- How J.A. Baker became a great writer after showing no signs of talent for forty years
- The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, Steve Brusatte
- How to spot great talent. James Lees-Milne and the Fitzgerald Rule.
- Is it a mismatch for conservatives with traditional values to believe in the free market?
- Some useful mental models
- The Golden Age of Murder, Martin Edwards
- Stubborn Attachments, Tyler Cowen
- After you with the pistol, Kyril Bonfiglioli
- Go on a rainwalk
- Plotinus quotes
- What are you doing with your time?
- Chemo didn't change my mind about the NHS
- Black Lives Matter as a global movement
- Things that go beyond the small utilities of our lives
- Liberal, not that liberal
- The meaning of enterprise
- Who knows what to think?
- The Wind in the Willows
- Arsenic and Old Lace
- Living through periods of change
- Monk, Season 2
- The Division Bell Mystery, Ellen Wilkinson
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
- The most basic political mistake
- We still have ideals
- Monk
- Remake Hong Kong in the UK
- What did you achieve on lockdown
- Dominic Cummings, political culture and the hypocrisy of outrage.
- The Body Vanished
- Terence
- When faced with people's bad behavior
- The Honjin Murders, Seishi Yokomizo
- Pelargoniums
- Contemplating timescales that transcend the everyday
- The Girl from Andros, Terence
- Peace through poetry. A pamphleteers micro-anthology.
- This all started after 9/11
- Molière and the Fitzgerald Rule
- The humanity of one man is the humanity of every one
- A made-up bed with a bottle of sherry a dictionary, Roget's thesaurus, yellow pads, an ash tray and a bible
- Nothing is quite honest that is not commercial. Robert Frost
- A simple question about space aliens
- A micro-anthology of Robert Frost poems
- Unmade words. How Robert Frost became the poet of his generation with "tones that haven't been brought to book".
- Darwin's theological reflex and a new species of scientist
- Mortal stakes
- What I have been reading
- Celebrate the heroes, remember the victims
- Start teaching rhetoric in schools and universities again
- A micro-anthology of Jack Gilbert poems. 'The best is often when nothing is happening.'
- Second Empire, Richie Hofmann
- The vagueness of passions, or, don't marry actresses (or opiate-taking musicians who compose symphonies for you after they see you in a play one day and then want to marry you when you meet them six years later, to be fair)
- Beware the inspiring phrase
- Why do we need question marks
- A micro-anthology of poems about rain.
- Polyphonic rhyme. 'All the minutiae of his craft.'
- A micro-anthology of Imagist poems by non-Imagist poets
- John Berryman and the Fitzgerald Rule
- A micro-anthology of devotion poems
- William Shakespeare and the Fitzgerald Rule
- Oaxaca Journal, Oliver Sacks
- People used to dance to classical music
- The longing to escape to true music
- Spring, south London edition
- A micro-anthology of prose poems
- A micro-anthology of Imagist poems
- The whole of life is symbolic because it is meaningful
- 'The brimming world.' A micro-anthology of poems about rain
- Bacchylides and the Fitzgerald rule
- T.S.Eliot and a footnote to the dawn. (Writing in the plain style is hard work.)
- The light of the television set washes through me
- A micro-anthology of Twentieth Century American poems
- The Tempest, biography play
- Robert Frost and the Fitzgerald Rule
- The disappointingly partisan, fake-news Protestant movement
- Torrents are made of droplets.
- Anthologies I would like to read
- A micro-anthology of contemporary poetry.
- Shakespeare's use of the three-part-line in Act I of King Lear
- Your only competition is yourself.
- Birdsong
- Singers are happier
- Children are engineers
- You don't always need answers
- The three-part-line in poetry
- Rear Window, pandemic movie
- What marks a poet out? Vernacular rhetoric
- Ghosts, aliens or conspiracies?
- Stop chasing the wind
- COVID internet reading today
- A list of thirty facts and quotes about the Black Death
- How to non-horribly leverage guilt
- Catch a boat to England baby
- The Old Man and the Gun
- Why I wonder what exactly Dominic Cummings said about pandemics
- Why can't you just unilaterally decide that your life is meaningful?
- I happened to be standing
- The changing pandemic value of social skills
- What are the best documentaries on YouTube?
- A coronavirus reading list
- Richard Hugo, 'Degrees of Grey in Philipsburg', and the Fitzgerald Rule
- Fire is the test of gold. Chemo lessons for the pandemic.
- Be a little snobbish
- Do writers have to write every day?
- The UK's (political) coronavirus gamble
- The Fitzgerald Rule, waitress scriptwriter edition
- Cancel the events, stop the spread, keep people alive.
- People who have not yet succeeded but maybe they will
- How to brainstorm better
- Talent attraction and the candidate of the future. Make yourself a better product.
- We are not the cause of ourselves
- We never do live quiet. The Mirror and the Light, Hilary Mantel.
- Siddhartha, Herman Hesse
- Time and wisdom. Siddhartha, Herman Hesse; The Order of Time, Carlo Rovelli
- How to go home from work satisfied
- Five things I have learnt recently
- Why Homer matters
- The Coronavirus Pandemic
- Maigret's enviable job
- AI assistants and a reverse Turing Test
- Your life is precious, and are we all eugenicists now?
- Who needs parents anyway?
- From the comments on Marginal Revolution
- Ageism in Hollywood
- Which theory of the self is most believed in?
- Maigret and the Wine Merchant
- More ways to solve the Fermi Paradox
- Genetic decadence
- When the decay takes over the culture
- A list of ten ways we are decadent and a (speculative) theory about why it might not matter
- Decadence and intergenerational relationships
- A Room with a View, by E.M.Forster
- The Luck of the Vails, by E.F.Benson
- Resistance in the Age of Decadence
- David Brooks sounds like Camile Paglia
- 10 simple ways to be better informed, or How to be an infovore
- Three of the best innovative biographies
- Reasons to make your own (wholemeal) bread
- Syntax and tone in The Economist
- Buried for Pleasure, by Edmund Crispin
- Harmonielehre, by John Adams
- Conan Doyle, or, The Whole Art of Storytelling, by Michael Dirda
- Syntax is the secret to good writing
- How Chekhov became a great storyteller
- How much did Churchill really drink?
- A list of solutions to the Fermi Paradox
- The Truman Show