Martin Amis, Experience:
Professor D.R. Shackleton Bailey, a.k.a. Shack – though the former appellation is the more descriptive. Shack is still a world-class authority on Cicero. He was, moreover, I always thought, the diametrical opposite of my father: a laconic, unsmiling, dumpty-shaped tightwad. I used to say to myself: Mum’s had enough of charm. Still, Shack had an interesting head. For twenty years, before he took up the professorship at Michigan, he was the Cambridge University Lecturer in Tibetan. And I was once around the place when he experimented, as they say, with LSD. To me he seemed to be on the verge of total freakout for several hours, but he later pronounced himself pleased with the exercise.
[footnote on p. 152 of the Vintage paperback edition]
