conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a book titled The Unexpected Professor about Emeritus, Professor, Oxford with the genre: Biographies & Memoirs, Memoirs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: the author is an Emeritus Professor at Oxford University. His books include studies of Donne, Dickens and Thackeray, The Intellectuals and the Masses , What Good Are the  Arts? and a life of William Golding.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first two paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Unexpected Professor
  There is no man doth a wrong for the wrong's sake, but thereby to purchase himself profit or pleasure or honour or the like. Therefore, why should I be angry with a man for loving himself better than me? And if any man should do wrong merely out of ill nature, why, yet it is but like the thorn or briar, which prick and scratch because they can do no other.
  I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that there were any way to perpetuate the world without this trivial and vulgar act of coition. It is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life, nor is there anything that will more deject his cooled imagination, when he shall consider what an odd and unworthy piece of folly he hath committed.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: From Eton he went straight into the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, where he saw imperialism from the inside, which means he did not see it simply, as the standard lefty did. It was possible, he realised, to be a decent person and an imperialist – as he felt Kipling had been. He was aware that the empire was a system of exploitation, and was guilty of atrocities, but he understood the pressures that drove men to commit them. As 'Shooting an Elephant' records, he knew what it was like to be hooted at by hostile crowds and surrounded by 'sneering yellow faces', and he was courageous enough to admit how it made him feel. 'With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts.' To set against this there is his essay 'A Hanging' – the first thing to read if you are new to Orwell. There are people – Sebastian Faulks is one – who say that reading this essay as a teenager changed their lives, and that seems to me entirely credible. It describes how Orwell and an armed escort are marching a condemned prisoner – a young Burmese – across the prison yard to the gallows when a stray dog comes bounding over to them, wagging its tail, eager for a game, and playfully jumps up at the prisoner and licks his face. The others are aghast and shoo the dog away because it has – though only a dog – recognised the man they are going to kill as a living human being just like the rest of them. It's a moment Tolstoy would have been proud of, and though it's not known whether Orwell experienced it or just made it up, it hardly matters. What matters is that his imagination has seized on it and seen its depth.
  It was after the Spanish Civil War that he finally made up his mind what socialism meant for him. It did not mean the abolition of private property (which he had once advocated), but it did mean state ownership of all means of production – land, mines, ships, machinery – and an approximate equalisation of incomes, so that the highest paid in the country could not earn more than ten times what the lowest earned. Hereditary privileges would be abolished, so would private education. The public schools and universities would be filled with state-aided pupils chosen simply on grounds of ability.
  These aims correlated so exactly with my own beliefs that I felt like cheering, and I admired even more Orwell's frugality and contempt for luxury. The cottage he moved into with Eileen in 1938 had no electricity, bathroom or hot water, and the privy was at the bottom of the garden. He kept goats, bred pullets for their eggs and grew his own vegetables. The smallholding on the Isle of Jura he rented towards the end of his life was still more primitive, and his self-help became more ambitious. Cows, a pig, chickens and geese joined the goats, and he shot rabbits and cured their skins. He welcomed wartime food rationing. It meant, he observed, that there were fewer 'grossly fat' people about, and rations provided a healthier diet than pre-war plenty had (post-war statistics proved him right – the nation's health improved during the war and the infant mortality rate fell). Besides, a wartime diet was more realistic because it reduced dependence on imported foods, returning Britons to the 'natural diet of these islands' – oatmeal, herrings, milk, potatoes, green vegetables and apples. You might say that it was easier for Orwell to welcome food rationing because food did not interest him much. He once ate a dish of boiled eels that Eileen had cooked for the cat – the cat had Orwell's shepherd's pie instead. He enjoyed predicting dourly in the queue at the BBC canteen that, with food shortages worsening, the chalked menu-board would have 'Rat Soup' on it in a year's time, and in two years it would be replaced by 'Mock Rat Soup'. However, the fact that he did not care about luxury foodstuffs, as opposed to reluctantly having to give them up, seemed to me to make him more admirable not less.
  I suppose this was because I was a wartime child, brought up to think austerity good. But it was also because I was moulded by English literature, in which luxury, especially at the expense of others, is always bad. Orwell welcomed clothes rationing as well, and hoped it would continue 'until moths have devoured the last dinner jacket', even if it meant everyone wearing dyed battle dress in the interim. That was fine with me too. No one, or anyway no male, who grew up in the war cares about clothes as much as those born after it.
  The only other twentieth-century writer who, it seemed to me, could challenge comparison with Lawrence and Orwell was Joseph Conrad. He was completely different from them, because he believed in nothing at all. Orwell believed in socialism, Lawrence in his dark gods. But for Conrad all belief was illusory. In a letter to his friend Cunninghame Graham he likens the universe to a knitting machine, which has come into existence by pure chance – the collision of atoms. It has created, and will destroy, everything, including mankind. The sun will cool and the human race will perish 'in cold, darkness and silence', and it will be an insignificant detail in the vast insignificance of the cosmos. 'The most withering thought is that the infamous thing has made itself: made itself without thought, without conscience, without foresight, without eyes, without heart. It is tragic accident – and it has happened.' To believe in anything positive or hopeful is, for Conrad, ridiculous, like believing that you can convert the knitting machine into a machine that does beautiful embroidery by applying 'the right kind of oil'. Everything is meaningless – the chance product of a meaningless universe that creates and destroys us. 'It knits us in and it knits us out. It has knitted time, space, pain, death, corruption, despair and all the illusions – and nothing matters.' In the face of this implacable, alien cosmos, Conrad decided, the only reasonable attitude is 'cold unconcern' – though he admitted to Cunninghame Graham that observing the 'remorseless process' and the human beings caught up in it can also be 'sometimes amusing'.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Lacking her foreknowledge I sat miserably in the front row while the chairman of the judges carefully analysed each of the shortlisted biographies in turn. His assurances that it was an extremely strong shortlist and that the losers should not be downcast were aimed, I felt certain, exclusively at me. His sympathetic gaze lingered over me while he said it. I think I closed my eyes as a kind of defence mechanism when he drew breath to announce the winner, and when he did it took a moment to sink in that my Golding biography had won. I was far more moved than was appropriate for someone who knew literary prizes to be meaningless. But then, academic matters apart, I had not won anything since the Richmond and East Sheen Grammar School for Boys cross-country run some fifty-eight years before.
  There are as many answers to that question as there are readers. My answer is that reading opens your mind to alternative ways of thinking and feeling. Read Richard Dawkins and you think and feel one way about religion. Read George Herbert and you think and feel another. Book-burners try to destroy ideas that differ from their own. Reading does the opposite. It encourages doubt. Think of Donne:
  Reading makes you see that ordinary things are not ordinary. Remember Keats: 'The setting sun will always set me to rights, or if a sparrow come before my window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.' Remember Larkin's wishes for a friend's newborn daughter:
  Reading is vast, like the sea, but you can dip into it anywhere and be refreshed. Reading takes you into other minds and makes them part of your own. Reading releases you from the limits of yourself. Reading is freedom. Now read on. 
  Julian Loose and Kate Murray-Browne at Faber and Faber have kept me going with their help and encouragement, and my wife Gill has co-operated unstintingly from start to finish – and after.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Reverse the sentences.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Julian Loose and Kate Murray-Browne at Faber and Faber have kept me going with their help and encouragement, and my wife Gill has co-operated unstintingly from start to finish – and after.. Now read on. Reading is freedom. Reading releases you from the limits of yourself. Reading takes you into other minds and makes them part of your own.' Remember Larkin's wishes for a friend's newborn daughter:
  Reading is vast, like the sea, but you can dip into it anywhere and be refreshed. Remember Keats: 'The setting sun will always set me to rights, or if a sparrow come before my window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel. Think of Donne:
  Reading makes you see that ordinary things are not ordinary. It encourages doubt. Reading does the opposite. Book-burners try to destroy ideas that differ from their own. Read George Herbert and you think and feel another. Read Richard Dawkins and you think and feel one way about religion. My answer is that reading opens your mind to alternative ways of thinking and feeling.
  There are as many answers to that question as there are readers. But then, academic matters apart, I had not won anything since the Richmond and East Sheen Grammar School for Boys cross-country run some fifty-eight years before. I was far more moved than was appropriate for someone who knew literary prizes to be meaningless. I think I closed my eyes as a kind of defence mechanism when he drew breath to announce the winner, and when he did it took a moment to sink in that my Golding biography had won. His sympathetic gaze lingered over me while he said it. His assurances that it was an extremely strong shortlist and that the losers should not be downcast were aimed, I felt certain, exclusively at me.Lacking her foreknowledge I sat miserably in the front row while the chairman of the judges carefully analysed each of the shortlisted biographies in turn