This has remarkable similarities to David Lodge’s Quite a Good Time to Be Born; both are straightforward chronological autobiographies of working-class, bookish lads who were born in London in 1935, evacuated from the capital during the War, and went on to do military service and embark on a perhaps unlikely academic career alongside their own writing projects. Carey’s is the more interesting of the two books for bibliophile readers unfamiliar with the subject’s work, while Lodge’s is really best suited to his die-hard fans. (I am one, so I loved it, but I can recognize that its style is rather workmanlike.)

The subtitle is “An Oxford Life in Books,” and although Carey does give a thorough picture of events in his personal and professional lives, the focus is always on his literary education: the books that have meant the most to him and the way his taste and academic specialties have developed over the years. “Perhaps most people form their aesthetic preferences very early, or maybe they are partly inbred,” he writes. “I don’t know. But I do know that I wanted poems to supply vivid, sensuous images [like Chesterton, Keats and Tennyson], and I still prefer ones that do.”

If you can believe it, when Carey got to Oxford in the 1950s the English literature syllabus ended at 1832 – meaning the Victorians and Moderns were utterly excluded. Instead you started with Anglo-Saxon and Middle English, which had him once sit in on a lecture by J. R. R. Tolkien, who “was mostly inaudible and, when audible, incomprehensible.” Ha! So to begin with Carey specialized in the seventeenth century, particularly Donne and Milton (whose Christian Doctrine he translated from Latin and whose annotated poems he edited).

It was only once Carey was already an Oxford professor that he educated himself in the Victorians and Moderns, discovering a deep love for Dickens and Thackeray (he would write books on both) on the one hand and Lawrence, Orwell, Conrad and Larkin on the other. He also produced the first biography of William Golding and won a James Tait Black award for it. His other published work includes the much-maligned The Intellectuals and the Masses (about the cultural shift to Modernism, which excluded the unlearned masses), the controversial What Good Are the Arts? (which argued for total subjectivity, i.e. art is anything anyone has ever called art), and several thematic anthologies for Faber.

I especially enjoyed the “Reviewing” chapter: Carey estimates that he has reviewed upwards of 1000 books for the likes of the New Statesman and the Times, and here chooses the 20 books that have stuck with him the most over the decades, generally biographies and sweeping social histories. Of these the one I’ve read is Mauve by Simon Garfield and the one that most appeals to me is Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks.

Ultimately what this book conveys is the joy of being a lifelong reader. The remarkably compact final chapter, “So, in the End, Why Read?” gives multiple good reasons and ends with the exhortation “Now read on.” He doesn’t have to tell me twice.

A lovely book, written with warmth and intelligence. Highly recommended.