Sitemap - 2025 - The Common Reader
What do we owe each other once we become different sorts of people?
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
Why we love Jane Austen more than ever after 250 years
John Mullan. What makes Jane Austen great?
Seamus Heaney: a jobber among shadows.
2025 was a very good year for literary writing on Substack
SHAME! SHAME! LET CHILDREN READ BOOKS!
Is it unliterary to oppose AI?
Jane Austen's first biographer
How English prose made progress
Rebecca Lowe: the container theory of time in On the Calculation of Volume
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
Robed as Destinies: Magna Carta, Thomas Jefferson, and bobblehead Nixon.
A response about Adam Kelly's new sincerity
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.
A simple test for developing taste
Is writing for AI the future of writing?
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."
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.
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.
Waiting for some great sign. Minor Black Figures
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
The online humanities revival continues apace
Misusing Mill's ideas to advocate for assisted suicide
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
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!
Does prose fiction count as literature?
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
Noah Smith doesn't read literary fiction
Mitt Romney at the intersection
Will tax cuts create more readers?
Jonathan Swift in the mattress store
Everything Flaubert did, Jane Austen did first.
The 25 best British and Irish novels of the 21st century?
Sweet Thames run softly while I sing my song
Willa Cather's case for reading the great books
Literature is calling you to put down your phone.
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’
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