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Malcolm Bradbury's classic skewering of 1970s academia, hailed by the New York Times as "an encyclopedia of radical chic as well as a genuinely comic novel" Among the painfully hip students and teachers at the liberal University of Watermouth, Howard Kirk appears to be the most stylish of them all. With his carefully manicured mustache and easygoing radicalism, Kirk prides himself on being among the most highly evolved teachers on his redbrick campus. But beneath Kirk's scholarly bohemianism and studied cool is a ruthless, self-serving Machiavellian streak. A sociology lecturer who outwardly espouses freethinking nonconformity, Kirk is himself vain and bigoted, dismissing female students and colleagues while releasing vitriol against those who contradict him, particularly his clever, wayward wife, Barbara, the long-suffering mother of his two children. A funny and incisive satire of academia and ideological hypocrisy, The History Man is one of Malcolm Bradbury's most acclaimed novels and remains just as sharp and witty today as when it was first published.
Malcolm Bradbury
Malcolm Bradbury was a well-known novelist, critic and academic. He co-founded the famous creative writing department at the University of East Anglia, whose students have included Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro. His novels are Eating People is Wrong; Stepping Westward; The History Man, which won the Royal Society of Literature Heinemann Prize; Rates of Exchange, shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Cuts; Doctor Criminale; and To the Hermitage. He wrote several works of non-fiction, humour and satire, including Who Do You Think You Are?, All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go and Why Come to Slaka?. He was an active journalist and a leading television writer, responsible for the adaptations of Porterhouse Blue, Cold Comfort Farm and many TV plays and episodes of Inspector Morse, A Touch of Frost, Kavanagh QC and Dalziel and Pascoe. He was awarded a knighthood in 2000 for services to literature and died later the same year.
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