The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books - Rilegato

Carey, John

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0571310923 ISBN 13: 9780571310920

Casa editrice: Faber & Faber, 2014

Riassunto

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.

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Recensione:

[It] conveys with incomparable precision the sense of a young mind being opened by, and dwelling within, literature. (Robert Harris Sunday Times)

An absolutely fascinating record of a literary life - half an insider's view of the growth of Oxford English over the past half century, half a meditation on the by-ways of modern Grub Street by one of its most distinguished ornaments, and at all times a penetrating account of how a superlatively combative critic found and developed the most vital weapon in his armoury - a sensibility. (DJ Taylor)

It's a pleasure to find him largely forgiving and maturely amused at the comedie humaine, especially as his prose remains as lean and buoyant as ever ... (Carey's) clarity of mind and expression enlivens where others deaden, and his judgments are powerful. If there were more academics with his energy and lucidity around, then literary criticism would be a happier discipline. (Rupert Christiansen Daily Telegraph)

It is much more than a memoir. The Unexpected Professor is a celebration of a lifetime's devotion to literature and a manifesto of sorts ... It is also a perfect example of his own creed, that reading is both liberation and a limitless source of pleasure. (Sophie Elmhirst Financial Times)

Carey is simply a reading obsessive and one with extraordinary, enlightening views. His account of life as a middle-class, grammar school boy is engaging and his National Service days are cleverly rendered. His upbringing in a quiet, enclosed home with a troubled brother is both moving and infuriatingly incomplete. But it is when he talks of poets, rhythms and the sheer, wonderful, all-consuming joy of reading that this book offers evidence of Carey in excelsis. (The Herald)

In his blog, which is largely dedicated to the keeping of bees, John Carey, for 30 years a professor of English literature at Oxford, states that he writes to "stimulate and involve the general reader". This autobiography, written with sympathy, a light touch and a sardonic sense of humour, amply fulfils that aim. (The Economist)

Descrizione del libro:

In The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, John Carey - English professor at Oxford, controversial commentator, book critic and beekeeper - reflects on a life immersed in literature, from grammar school beginnings to the Oxford establishment.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Faber & Faber
• Data di pubblicazione: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0571310923
• ISBN 13: 9780571310920
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 384