Memoirs of an academic brawler  

It’s a misleading title, because there is nothing unexpected about Professor Carey, in any sense. He doesn’t turn up to parties uninvited, like some of his less organised colleagues. As for his appointment, he was tailor-made for the job. Right class (middle); right school (grammar); right military service (guarding sand); right religion (books). An unsullied record of diligence as undergraduate, graduate, lecturer and tutor was combined with engaging resilience: ‘Teaching at St John’s was so enjoyable that I felt it was wrong to be paid for it.’

His outlook was just right for 1974; he was against ‘Old Oxford’, public schoolboys, compulsory Anglo-Saxon and all manifestations of waste, idleness and privilege. What he calls his ‘leftist leanings’ were no disadvantage. He had to dine out in the former Duchy of Oldenburg to find a ‘senior academic’ sufficiently diehard to be offended by them. His cottage in the Cotswolds was entirely comme il faut, and translating Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana with a cat on his shoulders was a positive recommendation. It is a very unorthodox work and we were all Roundheads in those days.

It was hoped by some that once he became a professor, such a cold and bitter wind would be blowing on the Oxford Faculty of English as never blew on Oxford yet. A good many of us might wither in its blast, but ‘a cleaner, better, stronger faculty will lie in the sunshine when the storm is passed’.

They call it ‘syllabus update’, and 40 years on it doesn’t seem to have made any faculty cleaner, better or stronger. They are all conspiracies of drudges with intrusive box-wallahs. Not at all what Carey had in mind; for the job of professor did not give him the power to remake the other English dons in his own image.