Arriving as an undergraduate at Cambridge in 1961, Terry Eagleton was both overawed and underwhelmed by his supervisor, a man he calls Greenway in his memoir. ‘Greenway was the first truly civilised man I had ever encountered,’ Eagleton recalls. ‘He knew all about cheeses, wisteria, Rubens’s brushwork, herbaceous borders, flying buttresses, gilt-edged securities, the bird-life of Venezuela, varieties of Malaysian fruit, Leibniz, Gregorian chant, brandy, the law of tort, the manufacture of saddles, 17th-century military strategy, breeds of North African dog, the vowel-sounds of Afrikaans, the vegetation of the Minho valley.’ But ‘he had no more ideas in his head than a hamster’ and his comments on English literature, the subject he was ostensibly responsible for teaching, ‘seemed the kind of thing that Princess Margaret might say’. Eagleton was probably a little unfair to Theodore Redpath, the polymathic model for this caricature. Although the playwright Simon Gray also thought him insipid, others disagreed.…