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The Common Reader

by Henry Oliver
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Latest episodes

  • James Marriott and the Death of Civilization

    October 7, 2026 · 53 min

    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…

  • Philip Hensher: How Can You Kill a Book Like That?

    September 2, 2026 · 1 hr 29 min

    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…

  • Zena Hitz: Gulliver's Travels and the Failures of Human Understanding

    June 3, 2026 · 50 min

    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…

  • Oliver Traldi: Jane Austen and the Defence of Virtue

    May 6, 2026 · 1 hr 14 min

    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…

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

    April 1, 2026 · 1 hr 20 min

    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?…

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  • Ruth Scurr: The Life and Work of John Aubrey

    March 18, 2026 · 1 hr 2 min

    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…

  • Naomi Kanakia: How Great Are the Great Books?

    March 4, 2026 · 53 min

    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…

  • Hermione Lee: Tom Stoppard. “It’s Wanting to Know That Makes Us Matter”

    February 4, 2026 · 57 min

    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…

  • Literature, politics, and the future of the humanities

    January 7, 2026 · 1 hr 3 min

    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…

  • John Mullan. What makes Jane Austen great?

    December 12, 2025 · 1 hr 12 min

    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…

  • Rebecca Lowe: the container theory of time in On the Calculation of Volume

    November 25, 2025 · 1 hr 11 min

    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…

  • Peter Pan video

    November 1, 2025 · 18 min

    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…

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About the show

Literary discussion www.commonreader.co.uk