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Chargement... The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Bookspar John Carey
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Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. Curled up on my sofa in mid-winter with the wood-burner blazing under my faux fur throw reading John Carey's memoir of his war-time childhood and journey into a literary life is utter bliss. What did I want from this book? I wanted the fantasy of an Oxford education and the nostalgia of a bygone era and by crikey I got it in spades. I have already read ' The Intellectuals and the Masses ' which may be the only book which quite literally had my jaw dropping throughout and really made me question my own reverence to the world of literature and the literary canon and so I was chomping at the bit to read The Unexpected Professor and find out more about Carey's life. Being an unashamed bibliophile Carey's memoir was an absolute treat. There he is amongst the dreaming spires actually living literature! He had me hooked from the moment he gave his views on the demise of grammar schools ( my Dad's been saying that for years!!! ) He brought my own reality into his ( his memories on Israel have been a topic of conversation in our home recently ) So thank you Mr Carey you let me play with you and with Tolkien, Milton, Donne, Orwell, Woolf and many many others if only for a brief moment - and on I go inspired and energised. I very much enjoyed [The intellectuals and the masses] and his book on Thackeray, so I had high hopes for a John Carey autobiography. And this is a very enjoyable read, with intelligent, entertaining accounts of wartime childhood in London and Nottinghamshire, National Service as an infantry subaltern in Egypt, and Oxford life as an undergraduate in the fifties and an English fellow thereafter. There are plenty of witty anecdotes and bits of lightning literary analysis, reasonable numbers of names are dropped, and a few icons are clasted in passing. Nothing very spectacular, and not much to stretch the mind: a holiday book to be enjoyed by people who remember some of the things he is talking about, not the sort of memoir that becomes a manifesto for the author's field of studies. aucune critique | ajouter une critique
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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. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)378.42574092Social sciences Education Higher education Europe England & WalesClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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Despite his reputation for concise reviews, his own book seemed curiously long-winded. The passages about his childhood at grammar school and then as an undergraduate in Oxford seemed curiously sterile. I was, admittedly, disappointed to find him so dismissive of Old English (though he did concede the wonders to be encountered in the works of Chaucer), but I would have felt that mattered less if he had spent longer discussing the works that he did enjoy. ( )