Bettie's Books
A Stuga On the Cusp of the Orust Riviera, tucked away next to a hobbit hole in the woods.
The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life
bookshelves: radio-4, published-2014, spring-2014, nonfiction, fradio, autobiography-memoir, mental-health, politics
BOTW. What a lovely kind face.
Description: From Biggles to bee-keeping, John Carey threads together the chapters of his life in books - taking in politics, social history and the skirmishes of academia along the way.
Vignettes of pre-war Hammersmith and Barnes accompany affectionate accounts of Saturday jobs which he was expected to do to compensate the household for staying on at school.
The book is also partly a tribute to the grammar school system. He skewers the snobbishness of Oxford in the 50s but also gives us endearing portraits of the writers and scholars he met and was taught by - including Graves, Larkin and Heaney.
Later in his life, his politics and his sometimes controversial cultural criticism take centre stage, producing a commentator who is not afraid to move between genres and labels, always saying something refreshing and frequently unexpected.
Read by Nicholas Farrell
Abridged and directed by Jill Waters
A Waters Company production for BBC Radio 4
Episode 1 - Family fortunes had dwindled into a genteel memory of former wealth by the time the young Carey was born in pre-war south London. Episode 2 - Rummaging in the study produced not just books but bullets too. Episode 3 - National Service in Egypt was an odd sort of prelude to an Oxford degree. Episode 4 - Learning Anglo-Saxon Episode 5 - The perils of being outspoken in the national press sometimes led to unhappy fractures.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR(wiki sourced): John Carey (born 5 April 1934) is a British literary critic, and emeritus Merton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. He was born in Barnes, London, and educated at Richmond and East Sheen Boys’ Grammar School, winning an Open Scholarship to St John's College, Oxford. He served in the East Surrey Regiment, 1952-4, and was commissioned. He has held posts in a number of Oxford colleges, and is an emeritus fellow of Merton, where he became a Professor in 1975, retiring in 2001.
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