John Carey

As a critic, John Carey confounds many professional writers by writing better than they do, with a gift for memorable phrase that few of them share. As a consequence, his disapprobation is much to be feared. In my early days I was on the receiving end of some of that, so I speak from experience. But he is not just out to cut pretentious writers off at the knees. (I like to think that his objectivity was proved when he found some of my later books more tolerable.) He is a happy celebrant of quality and knows how to detect it even when it comes from a figure he otherwise deplores, such as Evelyn Waugh. At the back of his critical prose there is a deep scholarship appropriate to the Merton professor and editor of Milton, and beginners with his work should not rest content with revelling in his polemical tracts (What Good are the Arts? is the most famous, not to say notorious, example) but be careful to see what he could do in his books on Donne, Marvell and Dickens to get deep into the wellsprings of English literature. The conversational rhythms of his writings are close to his manner of speaking: or, to put it the other way about, he talks as well as he writes, as this conversation proves.