A few weeks ago, I talked about what made the beginning of Dickens’s Bleak House so outstanding. Continuing on with this theme, today I take a look at Vladimir Nabokov’s demonic fairytale, Lolita. Everybody knows its euphonic opening line (light of my life, fire of my loins) but what else is Nabokov doing here? Join me and we’ll find out together!

In today’s video, I look at a piece of travel writing by Robert Twigger and discuss its mythological implications. Whether we admit it or not, mythic patterns are the grammar of our worldviews and are found not just in literature, but anywhere we encounter narrative.

In this series, I’ll be looking at some opening pages and talking about what makes them so great. Today, I’m beginning with Dickens’s “Bleak House.” It’s an opening I’ve covered before on my podcast, but there’s still so much to talk about. In twopages, Dickens not only manages to create one of the most unforgettable images of London fog, he does so while combining character, theme, and even plot, and all in a luxurious prose style that relishes words and never comes across as merely descriptive.

Among Shakespeare’s least-read works are his early, long poems: Venus and Adonis (1593), and The Rape of Lucrece (1594), and “The Phoenix and the Turtle” (1601). The last poem remains deeply enigmatic. What can it teach us today? And what sort of light does it shed on the rest of Shakespeare’s work?

In 2025 I got to reread one of my all-time favorites, "War and Peace." While it's widely considered the gold standard for lengthy, 'classic' novels, this title can often discourage would-be readers from this work, which, while long, never drags. Here, I give you one of my favorite scenes that occurs midway through book one.

Welcome to 2026! But before we celebrate too hard, it’s important to reflect on what a new year actually is. Are we going to keep repeating the same cycles we always have? Are we going to go on making the same mistakes? Or are we going to recognize that Christmas is the date that marks the revolution in our hearts, and New Years an opportunity to set that change in place? GK Chesterton has a choice adventure story in today’s poem that gets to the heart of what a change looks and feels like.

In this video, I talk about T.S. Eliot’s 1927 poem, “The Journey of the Magi.” Dashed off in just forty-five minutes, Eliot’s poem looks at the Christmas miracle from the perspective of the Magi, now grown old and full of years. In the midst of the Christmas season, we can forget that the Birth was not just the beginning of a new world, but the ending of the old. What must it be like, Eliot asks, to live in the knowledge you are between two worlds, having outlived the old, and unprepared for the new?

In this video, I talk about how Keats manages to find enchantment everywhere he looks: in nature, old books, the songs of birds, or here, on a Greek vessel which he’d read about in a magazine. Enchantment, however, is never a simple matter with Keats, who knows well that the spells Fancy draws can be fatal as well as fruitful. Be that as it may, Keats recognizes that enchantment, like beauty, fills and revives a world ever crouching towards death, and it is for this reason, he celebrates beauty wherever he finds it.