I was privileged to have been one of John Carey’s students at Christ Church in 1958-59, and can confirm that at 24 he was both painstaking and pugnacious – I shall never forget his sharp tutorial on Milton’s punctuation.
However, I’ve always been a little puzzled by his sensitivity to the class-consciousness still very evident in the Oxford of those days: as DJ Taylor notes , his was a quintessentially middle-class family; with that background and his formidable mind and achievements, he should not have been troubled by snobbish pipsqueaks.
When I attended the Oxford career service in 1961, I was advised that if I were to become a school master then, with an accent like mine, I should try Bradford.
