Cambridge and after
From our UK edition
My dread was that someone would ask me my opinion of Lermontov or Superstring Theory or the Categorical Imperatives of Kant. I would be exposed as a dull-witted fake. Having left the year before he came up, I could have reassured him there was little danger. Everyone, as he puts it, was in the same punt. Cambridge in the late 1970s featured only the usual sprinkling of genuine intellectuals and egregious talents — of whom Fry was an outstanding example. His opinions were perfect for the time and place. He considered F. R. Leavis a ‘sanctimonious prick’, abstained from D. H. Lawrence and Hardy, wallowed in T. S. Eliot and Shakespeare and took an informed, but sceptical, line on the ‘Parisian post-structuralists and their impenetrable evangels’.
