Reviewed by A.N. WilsonFABER and Faber, 362pp, £18.99Tablet bookshop price £17.10              Tel 01420 592974John Carey, once Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford, is an impressive combination of the scholar and the popular man of letters. He translated Milton’s Latin work De Doctrina Christiana. He knows about Ovid and Renaissance poetry. At the same time, he is an invariably provocative literary journalist, and his works of polemic, such as The Intellectuals and the Masses, are often pleasingly perverse.There have always been two Careys – the bee-keeping Oxford don, who wrote a brilliant book on John Donne and Catholic guilt; and the journalist who liked cocking a snook at received wis