John Carey, who has died aged 91, bestrode the ever-narrowing bridge that connects the academic teaching of English literature to the world of literary journalism like a colossus. An Oxford don for more than 40 years – 25 of them as Merton professor – he combined his professional duties with a half-century-long stint on the books pages of the Sunday Times. All this gained him a formidable reputation as the most erudite and possibly the most pugnacious critic of his generation.

Carey’s take-no-prisoners approach to the business of literary journalism was the distinguishing mark of his early descents on Grub Street. He was anti-elitist, anti-Bloomsbury, anti-anything that, as he saw it, patronised the tastes of ordinary readers or hindered their enjoyment of literature, and capable of wielding his pen like a scythe.

Clive James, still reeling from Carey’s assault on a collection of his journalism entitled The Metropolitan Critic (1974) 30 years after it was written, remembered that “my opinions that I had thought so bold were chased down, bitten through the back of the neck and dined off for their tender parts ... “ What made this evisceration worse, James reckoned, was the fact that “Carey could write”.

On another occasion, Carey began his notice of Martin Green’s Children of the Sun (1976), a study of interwar-era “decadence”, with the words “This book is richly stocked with people whom any person of decent instincts will find loathsome.”

As to where this animus came from, it is tempting to trace Carey’s approach to his craft back to what Anthony Powell – another writer he did not much like – would have called A Question of Upbringing. The Careys, their number amounting to six, were a quintessentially middle-class family from Barnes, south-west London, whose prospects were seriously impaired by the Depression.

Carey’s father, Charles, whom he greatly liked, had been a prosperous accountant, but the firm for whom he worked went bankrupt and by the mid-1930s genteel economy was the order of the day. If anyone seemed likely to restore the family fortunes it was John, the youngest child, an exceptionally bright and studious boy, who made his way to Richmond and East Sheen grammar school, won a scholarship to St John’s College, Oxford – his entry delayed by two years’ national service with the East Surrey regiment – and in 1957 was awarded a congratulatory first in English literature.

His class-consciousness sharpened by a year spent deputising for an absent tutor at Christ Church, where the distinguished economist Sir Roy Harrod refused to speak to him for the entirety of his appointment, Carey eventually became a fellow of Keble College in 1960, before transferring to his old alma mater, St John’s. By this time he had married Gill Booth, whom he had met at an undergraduate lecture. The couple had two sons.

Carey’s original reputation was made as a Milton scholar, but by the early 70s he had set up camp in the Victorian age: The Violent Effigy (1973), a groundbreaking study of Dickens’s imagery, and Thackeray: Prodigal Genius (1977) appeared on either side of his appointment to the Merton chair of English literature at the early age of 42, which he was to hold until his retirement in 2001.

Meanwhile, he was pursuing a parallel career as an essayist and critic, appearing regularly in the Sunday Times, where he became principal book reviewer in 1977, but also in lesser-known periodicals such as Ian Hamilton’s small but influential monthly magazine, the New Review.

There, although he approved of many of the books that came his way and said so, Carey’s stance was essentially that of a debunker. He believed that 20th-century British cultural life was, to a certain extent, a conspiracy in which ordinary people found themselves repeatedly hoodwinked by gate-keeping taste-brokers with a fatal attachment to modernism. These ideas informed his later study The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992) and, to a degree, What Good Are the Arts? (2005).

There was also, in the essay “Down With the Dons” (1974), a devastating assault on his own profession which, as one or two critics pointed out, could only have been written by a paid-up member of the demographic it affected to despise.

In all, Carey wrote, edited or compiled more than two dozen books. These ranged from well-chosen anthologies (The Faber Book of Reportage, 1987; The Faber Book of Science, 1995), to his highly praised study of Donne (John Donne: Life, Mind and Art, 1981) and a biography of William Golding (William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies, 2009). This benefited from the obvious affinity Carey felt for a man whom the Oxford Appointments Board had rated “not quite a gentleman”, and was awarded the 2010 James Tait Black memorial prize.

Tallish, thin, bespectacled and ascetic-looking, Carey could sometimes fail to disguise his irritation when other people made the mistake of not agreeing with him. He got particularly cross chairing the 2003 Man Booker prize (he had first chaired the committee in 1982). Here, determined to impress upon the other judges the merits of Martin Amis’s novel Yellow Dog, he began to read selected passages aloud, only for two of those present to be struck by a fit of the giggles.

But he was a generous and courteous man, much admired by his students – with whom he was prepared to take infinite pains – and revered by fellow critics, here in a world of declining print circulations and squeezed space, as the last great book-world don. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1982, and fellow of the British Academy in 1996.

He is survived by Gill and his sons, Leo and Thomas.

• John Carey, English scholar and literary critic, born 5 April 1934; died 11 December 2025