Malcolm Bradbury

With an introduction by James Naughtie Take a Valium. Have a party. Go on a demo. Shoot a soldier. Make a bang. Bed a friend. That's your problem-solving system... But haven't we tried all that? Howard Kirk, product of the Swinging Sixties, radical university lecturer, and one half of a very modern marriage, is throwing a party. The night will...

Written in 1908, A Room with a View is one of E.M. Forster's earliest and most celebrated works. Forster's social comedy is a witty observation of the English middle classes as they holiday abroad in Florence. One of these tourists is Lucy Honeychurch, a young girl whose heart is awakened by her experiences in Italy.

Francis Jay is a man of the '90s. Street-wise but eco-friendly, smart yet charmingly naive, when his journalism career falls on the rocks, he sets out to salvage it by embarking on a quest to write about one of the greatest philosophers of the modern age for a TV documentary. The myth of Doctor Criminale proves almost impossible to penetrate,...

Slaka! Land of lake and forest, of beetroot and tractor. Slaka! Land whose borders are sometimes here, often further north, and sometimes not at all! Dr Petworth is on a cultural exchange to the small (and fictional) Eastern European country of Slaka. Pallid and middle-aged, Dr Petworth might appear stuffy, but during his short stay he manages to embroil himself...

Widely acknowledged as a contemporary classic that has introduced thousands of readers to American literature, From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature brilliantly charts the fascinating story of American literature from the Puritan legacy to the advent of postmodernism. From realism and romanticism to modernism and postmodernism, it examines and reflects on the work of a rich panoply...

Stuart Treece, a forty-year-old professor and head of English, now rather set in his ways (Hannibal Lecter is not on his syllabus), is made to feel somewhat alien by his encounters with a younger generation whose values are decidedly at odds with his own. In this witty tragi-comedy, the hero's attempts to come to terms with his new situation are...

To the Hermitage tells two tales: a contemporary story of our narrator, a novelist, who has been invited to Stockholm and then to Russia to take part in what is enigmatically referred to as the Diderot Project, and one set two hundred years earlier in which Bradbury brilliantly recreates Diderot's journey to Russia to entertain and enlighten the mind of...

A ruthless satire of academic life, The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury is a witty campus novel and one of the most influential books of the 1970s. Take a Valium. Have a party. Go on a demo. Shoot a soldier. Make a bang. Bed a friend. That's your problem-solving system... But haven't we tried all that? Howard Kirk, product of...