This enabled me to do exactly what I wanted, intellectually speaking, for seven years, no questions asked. Then, almost immediately after my finals, I got a fellowship at All Souls College in Oxford. They said: ‘You can’t do theology and philosophy as it is not an honours degree. Tolkien, the author of Lord of the Rings, who taught me Anglo-Saxon. My interviewers were John Bayley, an English critic from whom I learnt a very great deal – he is more often known as the husband of Iris Murdoch but he was a great writer in his own right – and Christopher Tolkien, son of J.R. Neither theology nor philosophy were taught at school, so I chose English – I could say ‘at random’, but it wasn’t quite it was a subject I was studying at the time. I hadn’t the slightest interest in politics or economics, but they had luckily just started a degree called philosophy and theology, and I was interested in the kind of philosophy that has room for theology rather than economics.īut you had to sit an entrance exam to Oxford in those days, and it had to be in a school subject. I wanted to read it at Oxford, but I didn’t want to do P.P.E., which is their flagship degree in which you study philosophy, politics and economics. I have always mainly been interested in philosophy. Iain: Well, it wasn’t quite as sudden as it appears. From the outside, that looks like a remarkable thing to do – although I have learned from your film The Divided Brain that you were following in your father’s footsteps, because he too switched from an academic discipline to become a doctor. Then after obtaining a fellowship there, you suddenly switched to medicine. Richard: The Matter with Things would probably be classified as science and/or philosophy, but you actually started out studying English literature at University of Oxford.

The master and his emissary criticism