The Unexpected Professor Quotes

“My interview was mostly conducted by Hugo Dyson, an Oxford ‘character’, known for his wit. I always found him alarming. He was like a hyperactive gnome, and stumped around on a walking stick which, when he was seized by one of his paroxysms of laughter, he would beat up and down as if trying to drive it through the floor. It brought to mind Rumpelstiltskin driving his leg into the ground in the fairy tale. He had been one of the ‘Inklings’ – the group of dons, including Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, who met during the 1930s in the Bird and Baby pub opposite St John’s. It was he and Tolkien who, one summer night in 1931, had converted Lewis to Christianity during a stroll along Addison’s Walk. So he was, at least in part, responsible for the Narnia books. I never asked him if he liked them. But it was well known that Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings was not to his taste. Tolkien had been in the habit of favouring the Inklings with readings from it, but one day Dyson, driven to exasperation, interjected, ‘Oh not another fucking elf!’ and after that the readings stopped. On”
― John Carey, The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books

“Almost everything about bees is amazing. Worker bees fly up to three miles from the hive and visit ten thousand flowers in a day. Their wings beat two hundred times a second, and they perform elaborate dances on the face of the comb to tell other workers where and how far away food sources are. In summer there are fifty thousand of them in the hive, and each dies of exhaustion after about five weeks. In its whole lifetime a worker collects about a quarter of an ounce of honey, less than half a teaspoonful, but the yield from one hive in a good year can be over eighty pounds.”
― John Carey, The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books