The Common Reader

What a lot of fun I had talking to Zena Hitz about Gulliver’s Travels . As well as discussing Swift, slavery, genocide, rationality, Christianity, and science, Zena told me that good philosophy is like a box of cake mix and that a liberal education requires you to be freed of false expertise. I also took Zena on a detour to discuss Iris Murdoch, the Catherine Project, and modern philosophy. TRANSC...

My colleague Oliver Traldi recently published an essay called ‘ Jane Austen’s Virtuous Liberalism ’. It’s a very nice discussion of the ways in which Austen understand the challenges of character formation. Virtue, as Austen sees it, faces two tough challenges. First, people whose characters are not yet formed must see how to be virtuous rather than vicious. Then, the virtuous must somehow find a...

What a delight to talk to laura thompson about Agatha Christie. Above all, this episode was fun. Laura really does know more than anyone about Agatha and we covered a lot. What did Agatha Christie read? What did she love about Shakespeare? Was she pro-hanging? Why so much more Poirot than Marple? Why was she so productive during the war? We also talked Wagner, modern art, the other Golden Age writ...

What a pleasure it was to talk to Ruth Scurr, author of John Aubrey: My Own Life , about the great man himself, who was born four hundred years ago this month. Aubrey is best know for his splendid Brief Lives but he preserved a huge amount of knowledge which historians still rely on. There are many things we only know because of Aubrey—things about people Hobbes and Hooke, Stonehenge, architectura...

Ahead of her new book What’s So Great About the Great Books? coming out in April, Naomi Kanakia and I talked about literature from Herodotus to Tony Tulathimutte. We touched on Chaucer, Anglo-Saxon poetry, Scott Alexander, Shakespeare, William James, Helen deWitt, Marx and Engels, Walter Scott, Les Miserables , Jhootha Sach , the Mahabharata , and more. Naomi also talked about some of her working...

Hermione Lee is the renowned biographer of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Penelope Fitzgerald, and, most recently, Tom Stoppard. Stoppard died at the end of last year, so Hermione and I talked about the influence of Shaw and Eliot and Coward on his work, the recent production of The Invention of Love , the role of ideas in Stoppard’s writing, his writing process, rehearsals, revivals, movies. We a...

This episode of The Common Reader podcast is a little different. I spoke to both Jeffrey Lawrence and Julianne Werlin about literature, politics, and the future of the academic humanities. Questions included: what do we mean when we talk about literature and markets? Can we leave politics out of literary discussion? Should we leave it out? If we can’t leave it out, can we have nice friendly conver...

Tuesday is the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth, so today I spoke to John Mullan, professor of English Literature at UCL , author of What Matters in Jane Austen . John and I talked about how Austen’s fiction would have developed if she had not died young, the innovations of Persuasion , wealth inequality in Austen, slavery and theatricals in Mansfield Park , as well as Iris Murdoch, A.S. B...

I was delighted to talk to Rebecca Lowe , who is, like me, a great admirer of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume series. We discussed Calculation as a philosophical novel: how it’s narrative voice is like that of a philosopher, the thought-experiments of the plot, and whether, as Rebecca thinks, the whole series is an argument for the container theory of time. Rebecca is a fellow at the M...

I made a video of my recent essay ‘ What I Learned Reading Peter Pan to my Children ’. I made this video because it is one of the things I am most pleased with having written. You can watch it on YouTube or if you want audio only, that’s available here too. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co....

Shannon Chamberlain is a former tutor at St. Johns College, an expert in the influence of fiction upon Adam Smith, a mystery writer, Substacker , and amateur pilot. She is no longer an academic, and now works as a writer and editor . We talked about the history of the novel (Defoe, Swift, Fielding, Richardson), the links between Smith and Austen, epistolatory fiction, what Free Indirect Style actu...

I was delighted to talk to Rhodri Lewis, author of Shakespeare’s Tragic Art . We discussed Shakespeare’s most under appreciated plays, the best films, how to teach Shakespeare, humanism, personae, Frank Kermode, the future of the humanities, being supervised by John Carey, A.C. Bradley, what we have learned about Francis Bacon, and more. There’s a transcript below and you can also watch the whole...

My thanks to Catherine Lacey for a great discussion! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk

Frances Wilson has written biographies of Dorothy Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, D.H. Lawrence, and, most recently, Muriel Spark. I thought Electric Spark was excellent. In my review, I wrote : “Wilson has done far more than string the facts together. She has created a strange and vivid portrait of one of the most curious of twentieth century novelists.” In this interview, we covered questions lik...

Victoria Moul has been reading and memorising poetry since she was nine. She recites it at the dentist (‘ Aubade ’, rather alarmingly) and she recited poems all through her labours when she gave birth. We talked about all sorts of poetry, from ancient to living poets. What I really admire about Victoria is how at ease she is with poems across many centuries and how she can read as a scholar and wi...

In this interview, Lamorna Ash, author of Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever: A New Generation's Search for Religion , and one of my favourite modern writers, talked about working at the Times Literary Supplement , netball, M. John Harrison, AI and the future of religion, why we should be suspicious of therapy, the Anatomy of Melancholy , the future of writing, what surprised her in the Bible, the Si...

I was delighted to talk to the historian Helen Castor (who writes The H Files by Helen Castor ) about her new book The Eagle and the Hart. I found that book compulsive, and this is one of my favourite interviews so far. We covered so much : Dickens, Melville, Diana Wynne Jones, Hilary Mantel, whether Edward III is to blame for the Wars of the Roses, why Bolingbroke did the right thing, the Paston...

Clare Carlisle’s biography of George Eliot, The Marriage Question , is one of my favourite modern biographies, so I was really pleased to interview Clare. We talked about George Eliot as a feminist, the imperfections of her “marriage” to George Henry Lewes, what she learned from Spinoza, having sympathy for Casaubon, contradictions in Eliot’s narrative method, her use of negatives, psychoanalysis,...

Interview with Matt Yglesias about reading classic novels, like Middlemarch, and some discussion of his favourite movies. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk

The Shakespeare Book Club meets tonight to talk about A Midsummer Night’s Dream . Zoom link here for paid subscribers . Paid subscribers can also join this chat thread and ask me (or other subscribers) whatever they want . Tell us what you are reading, what you disagreed with me about this month. Ask niche questions someone here might be able to answer. Ask me anything you like (I might not answer...

After enjoying her new book Open Socrates so much (and having written about her previous book Aspiration in Second Act ), I was delighted to talk to Agnes Callard , not least because, as she discusses in Open Socrates , she is a big Tolstoy admirer. We talked about Master and Man , one of my favourite Tolstoy stories, but also about the value of reading fiction, the relationship between fiction an...

In this episode, James Marriott and I discuss who we think are the best twenty English poets. This is not the best poets who wrote in English, but the best British poets (though James snuck Sylvia Plath onto his list…). We did it like that to make it easier, not least so we could base a lot of our discussion on extracts in The Oxford Book of English Verse (Ricks edition). Most of what we read out...

Paid subscribers can join this chat thread about Pride and Prejudice . The book club meets on 16th February . I was gripped by a. natasha joukovsky ’s novel The Portrait of a Mirror , which I went through in almost one sitting (life gets in the way, alas). And I am enjoying her series of analyses of Austen’s men . Natasha works at Accenture, so we talked about what is it like to be a novelist work...

Atlas Shrugged seems to be everywhere today. Randian villains are in the news. Rand remains influential on the right, from the Reagan era to the modern libertarian movement. Perhaps most significantly, entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen who are moving into government with DOGE, have been influenced by Rand, and, fascinatingly, Andreessen only read the novel four years ago . Hollis Ro...

Tyler and I spoke about view quakes from fiction, Proust, Bleak House , the uses of fiction for economists, the problems with historical fiction, about about drama in interviews, which classics are less read, why Jane Austen is so interesting today, Patrick Collison, Lord of the Rings… but mostly we talked about Shakespeare. We talked about Shakespeare as a thinker, how Romeo doesn’t love Juliet,...