Sitemap - 2020 - The Common Reader
Good wishes from Samuel Johnson
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
The Anthologist, Nicholson Baker
Earthly Possessions, Anne Tyler
A Patchwork Planet, Anne Tyler
84 Charing Cross Road, film review
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.
Loitering with Intent, Muriel Spark
Evelyn Waugh, Ann Pasternak Slater
The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro
The Clerk's Tale and the expectation of astonishment
Bartleby the Scrivener, Herman Melville
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
The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt
Michelangelo and the Fitzgerald Rule
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?
The Golden Age of Murder, Martin Edwards
Stubborn Attachments, Tyler Cowen
After you with the pistol, Kyril Bonfiglioli
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
Living through periods of change
The Division Bell Mystery, Ellen Wilkinson
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
The most basic political mistake
What did you achieve on lockdown
Dominic Cummings, political culture and the hypocrisy of outrage.
When faced with people's bad behavior
The Honjin Murders, Seishi Yokomizo
Contemplating timescales that transcend the everyday
Peace through poetry. A pamphleteers micro-anthology.
Molière and the Fitzgerald Rule
The humanity of one man is the humanity of every one
Nothing is quite honest that is not commercial. Robert Frost
A simple question about space aliens
A micro-anthology of Robert Frost poems
Darwin's theological reflex and a new species of scientist
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.'
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
People used to dance to classical music
The longing to escape to true music
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
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.
What marks a poet out? Vernacular rhetoric
Ghosts, aliens or conspiracies?
A list of thirty facts and quotes about the Black Death
How to non-horribly leverage guilt
Why I wonder what exactly Dominic Cummings said about pandemics
Why can't you just unilaterally decide that your life is meaningful?
The changing pandemic value of social skills
What are the best documentaries on YouTube?
Richard Hugo, 'Degrees of Grey in Philipsburg', and the Fitzgerald Rule
Fire is the test of gold. Chemo lessons for the pandemic.
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
The Mantel Referent Sub-Clause?
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.
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
AI assistants and a reverse Turing Test
Your life is precious, and are we all eugenicists now?
From the comments on Marginal Revolution
Which theory of the self is most believed in?
More ways to solve the Fermi Paradox
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
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?