So I listened to What The Papers Say which pointed me to Terry Eagleton’s latest effort:

What would prevent most of us from doing so is the nausea which wells to the throat at the thought of this disgustingly elitist outfit. British universities, plundered of resources by the bankers and financiers they educated, are not best served by a bunch of prima donnas jumping ship and creaming off the bright and loaded. It is as though a group of medics in a hard-pressed public hospital were to down scalpels and slink off to start a lucrative private clinic. Grayling and his friends are taking advantage of a crumbling university system to rake off money from the rich. As such, they are betraying all those academics who have been fighting the cuts for the sake of their students.

I fail to see the point of his criticism in so many ways – it’s not like there’s a shortage of students, and if some want to pay over the odds to get exposure to noted people with possibly notable brains, then that’s fine by me.

His analogy’s flawed, by the way – why should a bunch of “medics in a hard-pressed public hospital” have claim to eminent domain over the butchery of their patients, or indeed why should the surgeons capable of drawing a private practice be locked into working for a public hospital? None that I can see – or, at least, none that does not presuppose a dreadful lack of individual freedom.

Eagleton’s name rang a bell with me via Geoff’s blog, and so I looked him up on Wikipedia:

(my emphasis)

Eagleton drew a connection between [Martin] Amis and his father (the novelist Kingsley Amis). The younger writer, Eagleton went on to write, had learnt more from his father [Kingsley] — whom Eagleton described as “a racist, anti-Semitic boor, a drink-sodden, self-hating reviler of women, gays and liberals” and “reactionary” — than merely “how to turn a shapely phrase”. Eagleton went on to argue that “there is something rather stomach-churning at the sight of those such as Amis and his political allies, champions of a civilisation that for centuries has wreaked untold carnage throughout the world, shrieking for illegal measures when they find themselves for the first time on the sticky end of the same treatment”.

[…deletia…]

Eagleton’s personal comments on Amis’ father, the novelist Kingsley Amis, prompted a further response from Kingsley’s widow, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard. Howard wrote to the Daily Telegraph, noting that for a supposed “anti-semitic homophobe”, it was peculiar that the only guests at the Howard-Amis nuptials should have been either Jewish or gay. As Howard explained, “Kingsley was never a racist, nor an anti-Semitic boor. Our four great friends who witnessed our wedding were three Jews and one homosexual.” In a later interview, Howard added: ‘I have never even heard of this man Eagleton. But he seems to be a rather lethal combination of a Roman Catholic and a Marxist … He strikes me as like a spitting cobra: if you get within his range he’ll unleash some poison.’

From that passage Eagleton sounds a rather nasty bit of work; perhaps his literary criticism of authors’ characters has become muddled with his perception of the authors themselves? The whole WP article is deeply critical, and with this:

Eagleton defended his comments about Martin and Kingsley Amis by article in The Guardian, claiming that the main bone of contention — the substance of Amis’ remarks and views — had been lost amid the media furore.

…puts me in mind of someone who is less interested in the facts than in tone, and… tone is important, but facts still win.

Someone to avoid, then.