When I was on the cusp of adulthood and trying to cobble together a literary education, one figure towered above all others in appearing to light the way. This was John Carey, who during the years I spent as a sixth-former, a “partner” at John Lewis and a first-year undergraduate chaired the juries of both the Man Booker Prize and the Man Booker International Prize and published his widely debated 2006 polemic What Good Are the Arts?, a loose sequel to his anti-elitist classic The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), which I had devoured in the John Lewis canteen.
In the same period he wrote more than 50 pungent pieces for the Sunday Times, on topics including the novelist Anthony Powell (“He had no ideas”) and the biographer Peter Ackroyd (“Surely Shakespeare’s life cannot have been as boring as this”); and appeared several times as a guest on the Radio 4 discussion programme In Our Time, where he was introduced as an “emeritus” professor of English at Oxford University, and spoke with especially memorable force and clarity on the epic, a subject I was notionally studying for the majority of that time.
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