Should there be a Library of Britain?
Yes and it should be as broad as possible.
Culture
The Common Reader.
Nerdy literature newsletter. Helping you make the most of your reading.
Recent essays
30 of 86Zena Hitz: Gulliver's Travels and the Failures of Human Understanding
Science, literature, philosophy, the humanities
What it is like to read Proust
an experiment
Oscillating at the zoo
No-one reads the exhibits.
Something understood. How to read poetry.
"We are as much as we see."
The literary world needs to wake up!
The Commonwealth Prize
To vex the world. Jonathan Swift’s Frustrated Humor
On the three-hundredth anniversary of Gulliver’s Travels, Swift’s satire of his own society is remarkably relevant.
What should be on a list of almost Great Books?
Give your suggestions in the comments
Bull Run, butterflies, Jeep Cat, prom
On the stone bridge that crosses Bull Run, where the first shots of the first land battle of the Civil War were fired, a group of teenagers in sparkly gowns and fancy dresses whose sequins caught the sun were being photographed, presumably for their prom.
You have no idea how many legends have walked these halls and what’s worse, you don’t care.
The Devil Wears Prada is The Godfather for Millennials
He says the early petal-fall is past
Dawn in Arlington, the Oven Bird in Fountainhead
The link between art and life
Nabeel on AI and art
Loved, Jefferson, Exile, Hermit, Brontë
some recent reading (and books I cannot finish)
Oliver Traldi: Jane Austen and the Defence of Virtue
Austen and liberalism, philosophy and fiction
Growling in a corner: Samuel Johnson’s lost years
In the life of a man about who more has been written than almost any other, it is the gaps that most intrigue.
A.A. Milne's crossword-puzzle heart in the Hundred Acre Wood
A hundred years of Winnie-the-Pooh
Out of all the indifferences
Difficult writing in novels and poems
Palms, poems, moderns
One novel and two books of poetry criticism
The Whitsun Weddings, Philip Larkin
Poetry by Heart, IV
The Stranger, The Drama, and the criticism of Ben Lerner
Two new films and one great review
The New Dark Ages: James Marriott in conversation with Henry Oliver
8th July Dr. Johnson House, 6.30pm-8pm
Steaming manholes, dolphins, and burnt-out houses
a day in Baltimore
wisdom through the awful grace of God
Arlington cemetery
The Clock in the Forest
On the Calculation of Volume, Vol. IV
The Future of Reading, the Honest Broker, and Michel Houellebecq
Three podcast appearances
Spring-time, night-time, rabbits and raccoons
Thinking of Lowell and Bishop in Arlington
Finishing Buddenbrooks
beware: spoilers...!
The Man Who Read Everything
Letters of Harold Bloom and six poets
Just give Helen DeWitt some money
The failures of modern literary patronage
Buddenbrooks, a masterwork of business and real life. A novel to love and live with.
notes on reading Mann from Austin