All articles from Common Reader

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

Teaching poetry to LDS students raised on the KJV

a comment on Victoria Moul's bog

How to memorise poetry

or, at least, how I memorise poetry

Prayer (I), George Herbert

Poetry by Heart III

Love Calls us to the Things of This World

Poetry by Heart II

Laura Thompson on Agatha Christie: Shakespeare, Murder, and the Art of Simplicity

a very fun episode

Old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.

To the National Gallery, where I was shocked by El Greco’s Laocoön. The three figures on the right are like wraiths or spirits, perhaps shades visiting the dying men, for they cannot be the spirits of