Henry Oliver

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. TRANSCRIPT HENRY OLIVER: Today I am talking to Zena Hitz . Zena is a tutor at St. John’s College. She is a philosopher, the author of Lost in Thought . She runs the Catherine Project. She’s famous on Twitter . We don’t know how she does it all. Zena, welcome. ZENA HITZ: Thank you, Henry. It’s great to be here. OLIVER: And we’re talking about Gulliver’s Travels because it is 300 years since it was published, and it’s a book that you love. HITZ: A book that I’ve loved for a long time. First Encounter with Gulliver’s Travels OLIVER: So tell me, when did you first read it? HITZ: Well, it was an important moment for me. I was in high school, and I was admitted to a scholarship summer program which offered college courses at different campuses. There were some normal-looking college courses at normal-looking colleges. And then there was this course at St. John’s called Science as Literature, Literature as Science. [laughs] It had this description that was just unbelievable. And I thought to myself, “This is the one, obviously the one to go to.” So I went, and we read books that no one in their right mind would assign to high school students now, and maybe not then. The fragments of Parmenides , Plato’s Timaeus , selections from Aristotle’s Physics , Gulliver’s Travels . After reading a number of—preface to Ptolemy’s Almagest , geocentric astronomy. And we read Gulliver’s Travels after reading selections from Hooke’s Micrographia , so the inventor of the microscope, and Galileo’s Starry Messenger , which is one of the great first uses of the telescope to discover the nature of the moon and the satellites of Jupiter. So then we read Gulliver’s Travels . We also read Emma and Flannery O’Connor and various other things. And one of the faculty who was running it said at one point, “Well, we thought we’d throw a bunch of things together and see what you could do, what you could make of it. We didn’t actually have an idea of how these all fit together,” which I think was probably true. At any rate, I think I came to Gulliver’s Travels thinking about these scientists who were looking at very large things and very small things, and thinking in general about the follies of human perception, whether that was shown in literature or philosophy or what have you, the ways in which human perception and knowledge don’t work very well. And I think Swift is still one of the best people to— Gulliver’s Travels is still one of the best books about that because it’s in the mode of a travel diary, an eyewitness account. Gulliver is trained as a surgeon, by his own account. He at one point says he was a bit of a projector in his younger days, someone who undertook scientific projects. And he’s a terrible observer, the worst imaginable observer, and Swift so brilliantly lets us see through his eyes, lets us see all the things he doesn’t see. And I think it’s not just about seeing and knowing. It has a very profound, I think, moral and political set of commitments. So it’s a very humane book. It’s social criticism, but from a point of v

Send us Fan Mail This week we welcome back to the show Henry Oliver! He is a singer and songwriter from West Yorkshire, England, known for his warm, retro‑influenced vocal style and his modern revival of classic pop, early rock ’n’ roll, and 50s–70s standards. He has built a dedicated and fast‑growing audience through YouTube, Spotify, and Patreon, where he performs faithful, heartfelt renditions of songs by artists like Bobby Darin, Neil Sedaka, the Everly Brothers, Engelbert Humperdinck, and Connie Francis. His YouTube channel, which features more than 13,000 subscribers and multiple videos with hundreds of thousands of views, showcases both polished covers and original material. We know you will really enjoy listening to this episode and to one of Henry's original songs! The links to find Henry Oliver on Social Media are listed below! TikTok: henryoliver_21 IG: officialhenryoliver FB: Henry Oliver Thanks for listening! Debbie and Gerry

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 writers, nursery rhymes, TV adaptations, poshness, nostalgia, Mary Westmacott, and plenty more. Transcript HENRY OLIVER: Today I am talking to the very splendid Laura Thompson. All of you will know Laura’s Substack . She has also written books about the Mitfords , heiresses , Lord Lucan , many other subjects, and most importantly today, Agatha Christie, who died 50 years ago. And there’s a new book coming from Laura about Agatha Christie’s 1926 disappearance . Laura, welcome. LAURA THOMPSON: So lovely to be here, Henry. I’m such a fan of your Substack, as you know. OLIVER: Well, same. Same. This is a mutual admiration call. THOMPSON: Well, thank you. Well, that’s what we like. Christie’s Favorite Writers OLIVER: Now tell me, what did Agatha Christie like to read? THOMPSON: Oh, a lot the same as us. I discovered she was a huge fan of Elizabeth Bowen, as we are. And Nancy Mitford, Muriel Spark. But her big love really was Dickens. She absolutely adored Dickens. I mean, she grew up in a house full of books, you know, and she wrote a screenplay of Bleak House for which she was handsomely paid. And it was never—I know, don’t you long to know what that was like? Can you imagine— OLIVER: We’ve lost it? We don’t have the typescript? THOMPSON: I’ve never seen it. I mean, maybe—I don’t know whether it exists somewhere. But I just wonder how she tackled it, what she did. But yes, so that happened. And of course, Shakespeare, as we know from her books, which are full of subliminal and—I mean, you kind of notice them, but you don’t have to. OLIVER: Yes. There’s Shakespeare in every book? THOMPSON: No, but it’s there, particularly Macbeth , which I suppose figures. OLIVER: Yeah. THOMPSON: Like The Pale Horse is completely Macbeth themed. And when I was a kid reading them, I think she really—Tennyson she uses a lot—she affected my reading in a good way. OLIVER: She sent you back to Shakespeare and the poets? THOMPSON: Well, sent me to them as a kid, probably. And also, there’s a lot of Bible in her books, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. OLIVER: Yes. Yes. THOMPSON: Very easy facility with quoting the Bible. Christie and Shakespeare OLIVER: Now, what did she learn from Shakespeare? Because she clearly knows the plays in detail. She sees them a lot. She reads them. She and he are, I think, quite good plotters. THOMPSON: Is she even better than he is? OLIVER: Well, let’s not get into that. But there is a sort of, in a funny way, a kind of affinity between them as writers. THOMPSON: That’s so interesting. <stron

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, architectural history. We also talked about Janet Malcom, the genre of biography, and modern fiction. HENRY OLIVER: Today I’m talking to Ruth Scurr. Ruth is a fellow of Gonville and Caius College in the University of Cambridge, where she specializes in the history of political thought. But more importantly, she is the biographer of John Aubrey, one of my favorite writers, who is celebrating 400 years of his birth this year. Ruth, hello. RUTH SCURR: Hi, Henry. OLIVER: Can you begin by giving us a brief life of John Aubrey? SCURR: So born in 1626, 17th-century antiquarian, collector, early fellow at the Royal Society. Well connected to scientific and the literary circles of his day. Someone who sees himself more as a whetstone: a person who could help sharpen other people’s ideas. As a recorder, someone who treasured the details, the minutiae of the lives he encountered, and pass those details on to posterity. He’s nonjudgmental, witty, kind, inventive. Very, very sociable. Very good friend. But he’s hopeless at self-advancement. Begins his life as a gentleman, but he inherits debts from his father and he can never really achieve financial stability. Never marries, ends up homeless and worried about being arrested for his debts. And he has to sell his precious collection of books periodically through his life to raise some much-needed cash, but he keeps his manuscripts safe. And he does this at the end of his life by putting them into the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, afterwards known as the Bodleian, and where they still are today. OLIVER: So how many manuscripts did he save for us? SCURR: Of his own manuscripts or other people’s manuscripts? OLIVER: Other people’s. Because he was collecting all sorts of precious things. SCURR: Oh, absolutely. He was the person who, when someone died, would go round if he could to their house and ask what was happening about the manuscripts. He’s particularly concerned, obviously, with his friends. So he had a close relationship with Robert Hooke and he wanted to make sure that Hooke’s many inventions and scientific contributions were recorded. And he has this wonderful line in the life of Hooke where he says, “It’s so hard to get people to do right by themselves.” And in his childhood, he had seen the fallout from the dissolution of the monasteries. He’d become very troubled by the habit of using manuscript pages which had been displaced in the dissolution. He saw them being used in schools to cover textbooks. He saw them being used to—or he heard about them at least being used—to wrap up gloves or to create stoppers in bottles. And this really troubled him from, from a very early age. And I think he has another beautiful line where he says after the dissolution of the monasteries, whereas these manuscripts had been kept safe, they flew around like butterflies. And he wanted to catch them and preserve them and to stop people letting the papers and the precious manuscripts of their relatives do the same. So he was very instrumental in rescuing manuscripts, other people’s manuscripts. And then fortunately with his own, he knew Ashmole and they had the shared astrology interest.

Sign up for the Chicago CWT Listener Meetup. Henry Oliver is the preeminent literary critic for non-literary nerds. His Substack, The Common Reader , has thousands of subscribers drawn in by Henry's conviction that great literature is where ideas "walk and talk amongst the mess of the real world" in a way no other discipline can match. Tyler, who has called Henry's book Second Act "one of the very best books written on talent," sat down with him to compare readings of Measure for Measure and range across English literature more broadly. Tyler and Henry trade rival readings of the play, debate whether Isabella secretly seduces Angelo, argue over whether the Duke's proposal is closer to liberation or enslavement, trace the play's connections to The Merchant of Venice and The Rape of Lucrece , assess the parallels to James I, weigh whether it's a Girardian play (Oliver: emphatically not), and parse exactly what Isabella means when she says "I did yield to him," before turning to the best way to consume Shakespeare, what Jane Austen took from Adam Smith, why Swift may be the most practically intelligent writer in English, how advertising really works and why most of it doesn't, which works in English literature are under- and overrated, what makes someone a late bloomer, whether fiction will deal seriously with religion again, whether Ayn Rand's villains are more relevant now than ever, and much more. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full vi deo on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel. Recorded January 12th, 2026 . This episode was made possible through the support of the John Templeton Foundation. Other ways to connect Follow us on X and Instagram Follow Tyler on X Follow Henry on X Sign up for our newsletter Join our Discord Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here . Timestamps: <p style= "font-size: 12pt; font-family: arial, h

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 habits and the history and future of the Great Books movement. Naomi, of course, writes Woman of Letters here on Substack. Transcript Henry Oliver: Today, I am talking with Naomi Kanakia. Naomi is a novelist, a literary critic, and most importantly she writes a Substack called Woman of Letters , and she has a new book coming out, What’s So Great About the Great Books ? Naomi, welcome. Naomi Kanakia: Thanks for having me on. Oliver: How is the internet changing the way that literature gets discussed and criticized, and what is that going to mean for the future of the Great Books? Kanakia: How is the internet changing it? I can really speak to only how it has changed it for me. I started off as a writer of young adult novels and science fiction, and there’s these very active online fan cultures for those two things. I was reading the Great Books all through that time. I started in 2010 through today. In the 2010s, it really felt like there was not a lot of online discussion of classic literature. Maybe that was just me and I wasn’t finding it, but it didn’t necessarily feel like there was that community. I think because there are so many strong, public-facing institutions that discuss classic literature, like the NYRB, London Review of Books, a lot of journals, and universities, too. But now on Substack, there are a number of blogs—yours, mine, a number of other ones—that are devoted to classic literature. All of those have these commenters, a community of commenters. I also follow bloggers who have relatively small followings who are reading Tolstoy, reading Middlemarch , reading even much more esoteric things. I know that for me, becoming involved in this online culture has given me much more of an awareness that there are many people who are reading the classics on their own. I think that was always true, but now it does feel like it’s more of a community. Oliver: We are recording this the day after the Washington Post book section has been removed. You don’t see some sort of relationship between the way these literary institutions are changing online and the way the Great Books are going to be conceived of in the future? Because the Great Books came out of a an old-fashioned, saving-the-institutions kind of radical approach to university education. We’re now moving into a world where all those old things seem to be going. Kanakia: Yes. I agree. The Great Books began in the University of Chicago and Columbia University. If you look into the history of the movement, it really was about university education and the idea that you would have a common core and all undergraduates would read these books. The idea that the Great Books were for the ordinary person was really an afterthought, at least for Mortimer Adler and those original Great Books guys. Now, the Great Books in the university have had a resurgence that we can discuss, but I do think there’s a lot more life and vitality in the kind of public-facing humanities than there has been. I talked to Irina Dumitrescu, who writes for TLS ( The Times Literary Supplement ), LRB ( The London Review of Books ), a lot of these places, and she also said the same thing—that a lot of these journals are going into podcasts, and they’re noticing a hu

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 also talked about John Carey, Brian Moore, Virginia Woolf as a critic. Hermione is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. Her life of Anita Brookner will be released in September. Transcript Henry Oliver: Today I have the great pleasure of talking to Professor Dame Hermione Lee. Hermione was the first woman to be appointed Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, and she is the most renowned and admired living English biographer. She wrote a seminal life of Virginia Woolf. She’s written splendid books about people like Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, and my own favorite, Penelope Fitzgerald. And most recently she has been the biographer of Tom Stoppard, and I believe this year she has a new book coming out about Anita Brookner. Hermione, welcome. Hermione Lee: Thank you very much. Oliver: We’re mostly going to talk about Tom Stoppard because he, sadly, just died. But I might have a few questions about your broader career at the end. So tell me first how Shavian is Stoppard’s work? Lee: He would reply “very close Shavian,” when asked that question. I think there are similarities. There are obviously similarities in the delighting forceful intellectual play, and you see that very much in Jumpers where after all the central character is a philosopher, a bit of a bonkers philosopher, but still a very rational one. And you see it in someone like Henry, the playwright in The Real Thing , who always has an answer to every argument. He may be quite wrong, but he is full of the sort of zest of argument, the passion for argument. And I think that kind of delight in making things intellectually clear and the pleasure in argument is very Shavian. Where I think they differ and where I think is really more like Chekov, or more like Beckett or more in his early work, the dialogues in T. S. Elliot, and less like Shaw is in a kind of underlying strangeness or melancholy or sense of fate or sense of mortality that rings through almost all the plays, even the very, very funny ones. And I don’t think I find that in Shaw. My prime reading time for Shaw was between 15 and 19, when I thought that Shaw was the most brilliant grownup that one could possibly be listening to, and I think now I feel less impressed by him and a bit more impatient with him. And I also think that Shaw is much more in the business of resolving moral dilemmas. So in something like Arms and the Man or Man and Superman , you will get a kind of resolution, you will get a sort of sense of this is what we’re meant to be agreeing with. Whereas I think quite often one of the fascinating things about Stoppard is the way that he will give all sides of the question; he will embody all sides of the question. And I think his alter ego there is not Shaw, but the character of Turgenev in The Coast of Utopia , who is constantly being nagged by his radical political friends to make his mind up and to have a point of view and come down on one side or the other. And Turgenev says, I take every point of view. Oliver: I must confess, I find The Coast of Utopia a little dull compared to Stoppard’s other work. Lee: It’s long. Yes. I don’t find it dull. But I think it may be a play to read possibly more than a play to see now. And you’re never going to get it put on again anyway because the cast is too big

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 conversations about it? What is academic Marxism? We also talked about whether Stephen Greenblatt is too ideological and why universities are necessary to literary culture, academics on Substack. Julianne writes Life and Letters . Jeffrey writes Avenues of the Americas . Here is Julianne’s interview in The Republic of Letters . Transcript (AI generated, will contain some errors) Henry Oliver (00:00) Today I am talking to Jeffrey Lawrence and Julianne Werlin. Jeffrey is a professor of English literature and comparative literature at Rutgers University. He specializes in the 20th and 21st century and he writes the sub stack, Avenues of America. Julianne probably needs no introduction to a sub stack audience. She writes Life and Letters, one of my favorite sub stacks. She’s a professor of English at Duke University, where as well as specializing in early modern poetry, she is interested in sociological and demographic studies of literature. and we are going to have a big conversation about literature and markets, politics, 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 conversations about it, and also maybe what is academic Marxism and what should it be and why is it so confusing? Jeffrey and Julianne, hello. Julianne (00:59) Hi. Jeffrey Lawrence (01:01) Hi, thanks for having us. Julianne (01:02) Yeah, thank you. Henry Oliver (01:04) I am going to start by referencing an interview that you did, Julianne, for Republic of Letters, which everyone has been reading. And you said, I’ve printed it out wrong, so I can’t read the whole quote. But you said something like, you joined Substack because you wanted people to talk with and because you felt a lack of debate in your academic field. There are lots of good things about scholarship being slow and careful, but it also needs to be animated by debate and conversation. and a sense of the stakes of what we’re doing, and that is eroding in the academy. So I want you both to talk about that. Why is that happening? How much of a problem is it? How much is Substack or the internet more generally the solution? What should we be doing? Why don’t we go to Julianne first, because it’s your quote. Julianne (01:54) Sure, I mean, won’t go on too long ⁓ since I have already spoken about this, but my sense within English departments is, you know, they’re becoming smaller, fewer people are taking our classes, we have much less of a role in public conversation and public debate, except as kind of a stalking horse for certain types of arguments. And certainly, if you are an early modernist, it’s very hard to locate a kind of a... Henry Oliver (02:14) You Julianne (02:25) discrete set of debates within

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. Byatt, Patricia Beer, the Dunciad, and the Booker Prize. This was an excellent episode. My thanks to John! Transcript Henry Oliver (00:00) Today, I am talking to John Mullen. John is a professor of English literature at University College London, and he is the author of many splendid books, including How Novels Work and the Artful Dickens. I recommend the Artful Dickens to you all. But today we are talking about Jane Austen because it’s going to be her birthday in a couple of days. And John wrote What Matters in Jane Austen, which is another book I recommend to you all. John, welcome. John Mullan (00:51) It’s great to be here. Henry Oliver (00:53) What do you think would have happened to Austin’s fiction if she had not died young? John Mullan (00:58) Ha ha! I’ve been waiting all this year to be asked that question from somebody truly perspicacious. ⁓ Because it’s a question I often answer even though I’m not asked it, because it’s a very interesting one, I think. And also, I think it’s a bit, it’s answerable a little bit because there was a certain trajectory to her career. I think it’s very difficult to imagine what she would have written. John Mullan (01:28) But I think there are two things which are almost certain. The first is that she would have gone on writing and that she would have written a deal more novels. And then even the possibility that there has been in the past of her being overlooked or neglected would have been closed. ⁓ And secondly, and perhaps more significantly for her, I think she would have become well known. in her own lifetime. you know, partly that’s because she was already being outed, as it were, you know, of course, as ⁓ you’ll know, Henry, you know, she published all the novels that were published in her lifetime were published anonymously. So even people who were who were following her career and who bought a novel like Mansfield Park, which said on the title page by the author of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, they knew they knew. John Mullan (02:26) were getting something by the same author, they wouldn’t necessarily have known the author’s name and I think that would have become, as it did with other authors who began anonymously, that would have disappeared and she would have become something of a literary celebrity I would suggest and then she would have met other authors and she’d have been invited to some London literary parties in effect and I think that would have been very interesting how that might have changed her writing. John Mullan (02:54) if it would have changed her writing as well as her life. She, like everybody else, would have met Coleridge. ⁓ I think that would have happened. She would have become a name in her own lifetime and that would have meant that her partial disappearance, I think, from sort of public consciousness in the 19th century wouldn’t have happened. Henry Oliver (03:17) It’s interesting to think, you know, if she had b

Episode 1 of the Year of Bach Podcast features Henry Oliver, author of the Substack The Common Reader, and the excellent book Second Act, a study of late bloomers in business and the arts. Our open-ended conversation touches on Bach, Shakespeare, late blooming, and the pleasures and problems of Glenn Gould. Henry describes the “expectation of astonishment” in music and literature, and names his favorite recordings. Links & references * Henry’s Substack – The Common Reader * Henry’s post on his favorite Bach pieces . * The Second Act (Amazon) * Selected recordings, with YouTube links: * Henry’s favorite: Gould playing the Sinfonias live in Moscow * My cantata gateway album: Lorraine Hunt Lieberson singing “Ich Habe Genug” * My ‘dark horse’ record: Peter Schreier (tenor) and Karl Richter (organ) perform BWV 487 - “Mein Jesu, was für Seelenweh” Support & subscribe * Get the full transcript and future episodes straight to your inbox: * Please share the show and rate it! Intro music: Adagio of BWV 974, performed by your host on his home piano. Transcript: The Expectation of Astonishment: Henry Oliver on Bach and the Hunger for Seriousness Evan Goldfine: Welcome everyone to the premiere episode of the Year of Bach podcast. This series features a set of conversations with artists and writers who have a deep and personal connection to the music of J.S. Bach and how this music inspires and moves them throughout their lifetimes. Today my guest is Henry Oliver. I. Author of the recent bestseller, the Second Act, a Study of Late Bloomers in Business and the Arts. He also writes the excellent Substack, the Common Reader, where he advocates for people to read the great classics of literature with a special emphasis on the works of Shakespeare and Jane Austen. He's also a great fan of Bach and a supporter of my substack from its earliest days, and I'm glad to have a readership that overlaps so strongly with his. So, Henry, thank you for being my first guest, and I'm excited to talk to you about Bach today. Henry Oliver: Oh, I'm delighted. This is, this is gonna be one of my favorite podcasts. Evan Goldfine: You're setting me up. Okay. So Henry, why do you keep returning to Bach [00:01:00] throughout your lifetime? Henry Oliver: Oh, because the best, the human, the human spirit loves what is best. We love beauty, we love excellence. We love virtue. Bach embodies all of these things. You can hum him. You can have raptures about him. He can be fun, he can be serious. He’s the Shakespeare of music, right. Evan Goldfine: Clearly. Do you, do you find it to be a more intellectual or emotional experience or both? Henry Oliver: , more emotional. I think maybe that's because I don't understand music to, to a great degree, but I feel that Bach is able to find deep expressions of human feeling. I prefer the word feeling than emotion, deep expressions of human feeling and very subtle expressions of those things. So I think one reason why the cello suites are so, so universally popular is because they give [00:02:00] voice to a set of moods that have not really been expressed quite in that level of finery before or maybe since. Evan Goldfine: Is there something there also about it being solo pieces along with the violin sonatas al

Send us Fan Mail You ever get that nagging voice saying, This isn’t it ? That “oh crap” moment where you realize you’ve been climbing the wrong mountain? That’s exactly what happened to my guest today, Henry Oliver—former policy wonk turned style blogger and unapologetic vibe curator. Yep, Henry ditched the government life to dive headfirst into what actually lit him up: writing, personal style, and, let’s be real, loafers. This episode is a total permission slip to pivot hard, even if you’ve invested years (or decades!) going in one direction. We get into why midlife reinvention doesn’t have to be a crisis—it can be a party. And Henry breaks down the subtle but powerful difference between asking, “What do I want to do? ” vs. “Who do I want to be? ” If you’ve ever felt stuck or like your life is technically fine but secretly soul-sucking—this one's for you. You’ll laugh. You’ll think. You’ll probably Google “good tweed jackets.” Henry’s got that effect. What’s Inside: How Henry made a major midlife career pivot (and what helped him finally take the leap) The identity crisis that can come with “success” Why style isn’t shallow—it’s a portal to authenticity A powerful reframe for asking, “What do I really want? ” So, real talk— Are you living a life that actually feels like you ? Or are you just playing a role you fell into 10 years ago and forgot to question? If you’ve been craving a fresh start—or even just a fresh vibe —this episode might be the sign you needed. I want to hear your thoughts: if you could change one thing about your life right now, what would it be? DM me on Instagram and let’s talk plot twists. Mentioned In This Episode: Henry Oliver’s blog (The Common Reader) The Second Act Registration is now open for the Membership Experience Oonagh Duncan (@oonaghduncan) on Instagram Fit Feels Good Goals, Grit and some Woo Woo Shit with Oonagh Duncan

Henry Oliver’s life journey is a testament to the power of reinvention and embracing one’s unique path. A writer and speaker based in Southeast London, Henry’s early career was shaped by talent attraction marketing and insightful essays on literature and history. However, it was during a challenging period of illness and time away from work that his perspective shifted, sparking the idea for his book, Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Reinventing Your Life. Reflecting on his own life experiences, Henry recognized the profound potential in those who may not yet have achieved greatness but are quietly preparing for their moment. His work blends biography, social science, and thoughtful exploration, celebrating late bloomers like Eisenhower and Katherine Graham while emphasizing the value of persistence, quiet preparation, and the transformative power of failure. Through his book and The Common Reader Substack newsletter, Henry continues to inspire others to see reinvention as an opportunity to write their own remarkable second acts. Starring: Michael Newborn ( @michaelnewborn ) John Ballenger ( @john-ballenger53 ) Guest: Henry Oliver https://substack.com/@henryoliver https://www.henry-oliver.co.uk/ Network/Produced by: Seltzer Kings ( @seltzerkings ) ( seltzerkings.com ) Theme Music by Saint Josh Listen Here: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/71Uji4fPLsnGEJjeAqomiJ?si=77e3d7bb636c422a Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-second-act-with-michael-and-john/id1707412739 Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/a6b369bb-36a9-47ab-9f22-1bacfcff6166/the-second-act-with-michael-and-john iHeart: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-the-second-act-with-michae-123242148/ Socials: Linktree: linktr.ee/secondactmovement Instagram: @secondactmovement LinkedIn: @secondactmovement Facebook: @secondactmovement YouTube: @secondactmovement Website: michaelandjohn.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices