PODCAST · arts
The Common Reader
by Henry Oliver
Literary discussion www.commonreader.co.uk
Episodes
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James Marriott and the Death of Civilization
Obviously, this is mostly about the literacy crisis, whether we understand it properly, whether it is happening in Spain, whether the PISA data supports James’ thesis, and so on. I began by asking James Marriott how things might work out for the best… OLIVER: So the book is about the reading…
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Philip Hensher: How Can You Kill a Book Like That?
Philip Hensher and I discussed the history of the novel in Britain from Defoe to Hollinghurst. Philip is remarkably well-read and happy to share his real opinions. He can go from Swift to Fitzgerald on the turn of a pin, isn’t shy about holding his ground, and has some very firm views. People who...
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Zena Hitz: Gulliver's Travels and the Failures of Human Understanding
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…
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Oliver Traldi: Jane Austen and the Defence of Virtue
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…
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Laura Thompson on Agatha Christie: Shakespeare, Murder, and the Art of Simplicity
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?...
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Ruth Scurr: The Life and Work of John Aubrey
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…
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Naomi Kanakia: How Great Are the Great Books?
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…
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Hermione Lee: Tom Stoppard. “It’s Wanting to Know That Makes Us Matter”
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...
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Literature, politics, and the future of the humanities
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...
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John Mullan. What makes Jane Austen great?
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…
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Rebecca Lowe: the container theory of time in On the Calculation of Volume
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...
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Peter Pan video
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…
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Shanon Chamberlain: what is a novel?
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,...
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Rhodri Lewis: Shakespearean Tragedy
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…
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Video of my discussion with Catherine Lacey about Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea
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
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Frances Wilson: T.S. Eliot is stealing my baked beans.
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…
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Victoria Moul. Poetry for life.
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...
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Lamorna Ash. Don't Forget We're Here Forever
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…
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Helen Castor: imagining life in the fourteenth century.
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…
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Clare Carlisle: George Eliot's Double Life.
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...
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Matt Yglesias: reading books makes me feel calmer.
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
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Katherine Dee. Finding life where others don't.
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.…
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Agnes Callard: what is the value of fiction?
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…
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The twenty best English poets
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…
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Natasha Joukovsky: literature, capitalism, and Jane Austen.
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...
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Is Atlas Shrugged the new vibe?
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...
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Tyler Cowen: Trump's DOGE team should read Shakespeare.
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…
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Brandon Taylor: I want to bring back all of what a novel can do.
Who else in literature today could be more interesting to interview than Brandon Taylor, the author of Real Life, Filthy Animals, and The Late Americans, as well as the author of popular reviews and the sweater weather Substack? We talked about so much, including: Chopin and who plays him best…
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Zena Hitz: reading the Great Books
I’ve been a big Zena Hitz fan since I read Lost in Thought in 2020, a book I am still recommending to people nearly five years later. We talked about Shakespeare, children’s books, St John’s College, the Catherine Project, whether you should read secondary literature, Tolkien, nuns, and we had a...
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Marion Turner: Chaucer's world
I spoke to Samuel Arbesman about late bloomers. He asked many splendid questions no-one has asked before. With Mark Crowley I discussed some practical aspects of late blooming. On December 5th I am talking to professor Stephen Greenblatt and psychoanalyst Adam Philips about their new book Second...
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Naomi Kanakia: How Great are the Great Books?
It was a delight to talk to Naomi Kanakia who writes the Woman of Letters Substack. We talked about the homogeneity of modern fiction, whether the Great Books are really great (and which ones she found boring), as well as economics and fiction. I enjoy Naomi’s literary criticism on Substack very...
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Catherine Lacey: internet geography
I was delighted to talk to the novelist Catherine Lacey, whose book Biography of X I admired very much indeed. We talked about personal websites, how she learned to code in HTML, 9 Beet Stretch, her writing on Substack (Untitled Thought Project), biography as a genre, modern novels, figurative…
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Nabeel Qureshi: literature requires the fuller engagement of your soul.
There’s a profile about me and Second Act in the New Zealand Listener. It’s very good so if you’re in NZ and have a subscription (it’s paywalled) do take a look. I chuckled at this line: “Speaking by Zoom from London, Oliver is a serious fellow, and has the manner of someone older.” This was nice...
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Hollis Robbins: literature makes you a mind reader
I always enjoy corresponding with Hollis Robbins (@Anecdotal) and was therefore delighted to talk to her about poetry and literature. It’s a wonderful conversation that ranges across so many books and ideas. We covered why there is no crisis in the humanities, why you should read Walter Scott…
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James Marriott. The value of being pretentious and the importance of the emotions to the intellect.
What a delight to talk to James Marriott, the Times columnist who writes about literature, culture, and being a millennial. James is very well-read and we covered the ground from Iris Murdoch to Harry Potter, from why men should read novels to whether the crisis of modernity is actually modern.…
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A.N. Wilson. Walking in mysteries.
NB The first two or three minutes have some audio glitches but the rest of the recording is much better quality. I was delighted to talk to A.N. Wilson, novelist, journalist, biographer, and historian, whose books on Iris Murdoch, Dante, and Prince Albert I very much admire, as well as his memoir...
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Tyler Cowen: reading John Stuart Mill
In Tyler Cowen’s new book there is a whole chapter about John Stuart Mill, and I think Tyler really gets Mill, and draws on many of the key sources, both primary and secondary. So I’m pleased to offer you this conversation about Mill and biography, economics ideas where Mill remains relevant, how...
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Zadie Smith and the revenge of beauty
This is the second part of an essay about Zadie Smith. You can read the first part here. As an experiment, I have recorded this essay so you can listen rather than read. Let know what you think… Both essays are partly paywalled. But, good news, there’s a summer sale—20% off a subscription if you...
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Noah Smith interview
Writing ElsewhereRecently I have written for The Critic about how to find somewhere to live in London, solving the problem of modern architecture, and in praise of stupid politicians. I also produced some epigrams framed as advice for young people. Noah Smith is an economics blogger with his own...
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Anna Gát, startup founder and late bloomer
NEWS * Podcasts are now available in places like Spotify and Apple Podcasts. If you listen to them there, please rate or like the episodes as this helps other people to find them. * I am writing films reviews on Letterboxd. You can find them here. You might enjoy this one about The Truman Show....
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Robin Hanson, interview
This conversation with economist and late bloomer Robin Hanson probably peaks towards the end, when we were bouncing ideas around, but the whole thing is highly interesting. Robin has a habit of rephrasing questions to make sure he is answering something specific, something I have seen in...
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Sarah Harkness, late bloomer
It was such a pleasure to talk to Sarah Harkness. Sarah is a former partner at Arthur Andersen who had a career in corporate finance and then as a non-executive director. She is now a literary late bloomer. She has self-published a book about the Victorian artist Nelly Erichsen. She has an MA in...
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Helen Lewis interview
Before we get started… Writing elsewhereI have recently written about modern Russian literature for CapX, as well Victorian YIMBYs and Katherine Mansfield and 1922, for The Critic.Tours of LondonSign up here to get updates when we add new tour dates. There will be three tours a month, covering…
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Charles Moore interview
I was very pleased to talk to Charles Moore, who I have read admiringly for many years. His three volume biography of Margaret Thatcher is one of the most interesting biographies published in the last few years. He also edited a volume of T.E.Utley’s journalism. In this discussion you will hear…
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does The Common Reader have?
The Common Reader currently has 44 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is The Common Reader about?
Literary discussion www.commonreader.co.uk
How often does The Common Reader release new episodes?
The Common Reader has 44 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to The Common Reader?
You can listen to The Common Reader on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts The Common Reader?
The Common Reader is created and hosted by Henry Oliver.
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