The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books

IT IS no surprise to find that this memoir by Britain’s leading literary critic is full of symbols: A shallow-bottomed canoe which goes to places other boats dare not; a Bakelite radio that picks up nothing but static from the universe beyond the written word; the Crystal Palace in flames as the era of empires draws to a close. Yet John Carey’s earliest memory is the oddest of all: an elephant on a London street. Of the many totems in The Unexpected Professor, this great beast — mighty in reputation but charming in person — is perhaps the one which most resembles the author.

An academic, biographer, and a longstanding presence in the British press, (particularly in the Sunday Times, for which he has written since 1975), the 80-year-old Carey is now an emeritus professor at Oxford where he taught English literature for four decades. He has chaired the Booker prize, authored volumes about Donne, Thackeray, and William Golding, and has proven to be an uncompromising critic. It is therefore a revelation to meet him as a child reading the kind of Biggles adventures which taught that “courage matters more than understanding poetry”.