The unexpected professor - John Carey

Best known for his provocative take on cultural issues in The Intellectuals and the Masses and What Good Are the Arts?, John Carey describes
in this warm and funny memoir the events that formed him - an escape
from the London blitz to an idyllic rural village, army service in
Egypt, an open scholarship to Oxford and an academic career that saw him
elected, age 40, to Oxford's oldest English Literature professorship.

He
frankly portrays the snobberies and rituals of 1950s Oxford, but also
his inspiring meetings with writers and poets - Auden, Graves, Larkin,
Heaney - and his forty-year stint as a lead book-reviewer for the Sunday Times.

This
is a book about the joys of reading - in effect, an informal
introduction to the great works of English literature. But it is also
about war and family, and how an unexpected background can give you the
insight and the courage to say the unexpected thing.