I'm currently working my way through John Carey's John Donne: Life, Mind and Art, and I must say, his writing style has to be one of the easiest and humourous I've ever read when it comes to literary criticism.

He's blatantly sarcastic, and finds the humour in places where you don't expect it. Normally all the talk of religion and Christianity vs. Catholicism debate yada yada gets me confused in no time, but John Carey is clear, concise, and writes with cutting wit. I actually understood all of his explanations about the religious and political atmosphere in the 1600s, and how it affected John Donne's poetry. All of a sudden Donne's Holy Sonnets have a new meaning, I know more about the struggle within himself after he became an apostate. It's thrilling.

I was about to launch into how A. C. Bradley is my ou xiang, and how John Bowen writes with such a conversational tone without making his criticism sound colloquial at all (although this may be compounded by the fact that I've sat through some excellent lectures on Oliver Twist that he gave last term), but I can talk about Bradley when I get on to Othello next month, and Bowen when I take the Charles Dickens module in Year 3.