Sitemap - 2025 - The Common Reader
Rates of pay for newsletter writers in the sixteenth century
What makes you a classical liberal?
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
Victoria Moul. Poetry for life.
Boys, Flesh, Christie, Hours, Trollope, Diana, Perfection, audiobooks
Lamorna Ash. Don't Forget We're Here Forever
Splendidly wicked vice in Jane Austen
T.S. Eliot and the Whitsun fire
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.
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.
Adam Smith's impartial spectator
Thirty-one facts about Richard II
The superiority of Studio Ghibli—over Disney and over AI slop.
Clare Carlisle: George Eliot's Double Life.
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
Does Jane Austen undermine her own endings? No. No she does not.
Jane Austen's alternative endings.
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.
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?
Twenty-five facts about The Comedy of Errors
Mr. Bennet and the mischief of neglect
Nelson, patronage, and meritocracy
AI and the future of literature.
Pride and Poverty? Lizzy Bennet's financial prospects.
Natasha Joukovsky: literature, capitalism, and Jane Austen.
Does the flame of genius burn past 30?
Literary culture can't just dismiss AI.
Why is Harry Potter quite so influential?
A place where knowledge is ours for the taking.
Twenty-nine facts about Richard III
Is Atlas Shrugged the new vibe?
How good is AI at literary criticism?
Is the Baroness in The Sound of Music a Nazi?
Austen saved me from social media