I’VE long believed grammar schools of the 1950s set the highest standards Britain’s state education system ever delivered, and this autobiography from an author and leading literary critic who began at Richmond and East Sheen Grammar School for Boys adds weight to this view.

Carey was a skiver at school, until he read Lepanto, a famous poem by GK Chesterton. After rapid bursts of Keats, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, plus Milton’s Samson Agonistes for A-levels, he then moved on to an Oxford and a rapid rise in the world of academia.

When Yale University asked him to spend years translating the Complete Prose Works of John Milton – a quarter of a million words, which would have seen the poet hanged for blasphemy if published in his lifetime – he accepted for no more reward than the honour of being named in the eventual book.

All that matters, Carey says, is reading, ‘‘It releases you from the limits of yourself. Reading is freedom.’’

Jeremy Gates