John Carey

Professor John Carey
photo by Freddie Phillips, 2014
(source: wikimedia)
no copyright infringement intended

chief book reviewer for Sunday Times, literary critic, historian and editor, emeritus Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford, Donne and Milton scholar, considering George Elliot to be by a long stretch the most intelligent of all English novelists, with anti-elitist views on high culture and Modernist writers (like T.S.Eliot, Yeats, D.H.Lawrence, Wells, Virginia Woolf - so he's not afraid of her, to play a bit with words and paraphrase Albee); all these being said, reading him seems to be like journeying with a time machine throughout the various ages of British literature, and having a great companion alongside.

Something very personal: in my small own journey there in those lands, just begun and very timid, Helen Hanff was a road opener, giving me the taste to approach for instance Donne, Milton ... and above all Pepys.

• Reading John Carey: W.H.Auden, Rhythm and Poetry
• Reading John Carey: Milton's De Doctrina Christiana
• Reading John Carey: Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici

(A Life in Books)