The History Man: Picador Classic (Picador Classic, 55)

The History Man: Picador Classic (Picador Classic, 55)

by Malcolm Bradbury (Author)

Synopsis

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 have all sorts of repercussions: for Henry Beamish, Howard's desperate and easily neglected friend, and for Howard's wife Barbara, promiscuous '70s liberal and exhausted victim of motherhood.

The History Man is Malcolm Bradbury's masterpiece, the definitive campus novel and one of the most influential novels of the 1970s. Funny, disconcerting and provocative, Bradbury brilliantly satirizes a world of academic power struggles as his anti-hero seduces his away around campus. But beneath the surface is an altogether more affecting portrait: it reveals a marriage in crisis and demonstrates the fragility of the human heart.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 272
Edition: Main Market
Publisher: Picador
Published: 01 Jun 2017

ISBN 10: 1509823395
ISBN 13: 9781509823390
Book Overview: `The funniest and best-written novel I have seen for a very long time' Auberon Waugh

Media Reviews
The funniest and best-written novel I have seen for a very long time -- Auberon Waugh
Grim wit, chill comedy and a fictional energy which is as imaginative as the tale is shocking -- A. S. Byatt
Malcolm Bradbury has come up with a novel that simply must be read -- Elizabeth Berridge * Daily Telegraph *
Extremely witty . . . Bradbury writes brilliantly * New York Times *
Very funny . . . a quite ruthless satire * Evening Standard *
Exhilarating . . . A book which captures for all time the spirit of an age -- Margaret Drabble
Author Bio
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 (1959); Stepping Westward (1965); The History Man (1975), which won the Royal Society of Literature Heinemann Prize; Rates of Exchange (1983), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Cuts (1987); Doctor Criminale (1992); and To the Hermitage (2000). He wrote several works of non-fiction, humour and satire, including Who Do You Think You Are? (1976), All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go (1982) and Why Come to Slaka? (1991). 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.