Much of Carey's vitriol has been deployed, over the years, against snobbery and intellectual pretension. The invective of "Down with Dons", written in 1975, was aimed not at scholarship but at the exclusive public-school arrogance of figures such as the legendary Oxford classicist Maurice Bowra, whom Carey attacked for their "unhesitating donnish assumption that the comfort and pleasure of ordinary people are of no account when set against the need to advertise one's superiority".