Sitemap - 2024 - The Common Reader

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 in 2024

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