Archive - The Common Reader

My true love hath my heart

Poetry by Heart I

10 hrs ago • Henry Oliver

George Steiner breaking my heart with his description of the way people used to memorise poems, Bible passages, classic works.

I'm going to memorise more poetry

Feb 23 • Henry Oliver

Elizabeth Bowen on Jane Austen's Englishness

Witty, detached, engaging and travelling lightly, her pen has been dipped in the purest English ink

Feb 20 • Henry Oliver

The Liberal Spirit of Literary Criticism

Lionel Trilling and the Common Reader

Feb 19 • Henry Oliver

How Francis Bacon read books

and so suffer no moment of time to slip from him

Feb 18 • Henry Oliver

Underground aliens and the future of humanity in 1871

Edward Bulwer Lytton and Humanity’s Inevitable Destroyer

Feb 17 • Anna McCullough

Pricks, Devils, and Phlegm. John Aubrey and the Fertile Facts of English Biography.

The four hundredth anniversary of a genius of the commonplace.

Feb 14 • Henry Oliver

Are books and babies compatible?

Some general thoughts and Hollis Robbins in The Republic of Letters

Feb 12 • Henry Oliver

Doomed to choose...

Seamus Perry, pluralism, and poetry

Feb 11 • Henry Oliver

Fierce, wild, intractability. Emily Brontë's untameable spirit

extracts from Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë

Feb 10 • Henry Oliver

Twenty-one reactions to Wuthering Heights

from 1847 to 2007

Feb 9 • Henry Oliver

Confederate flags and Shenandoah's timelessness

A startling, splendid, shocking place

Feb 8 • Henry Oliver

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