MALCOLM BRADBURY writer & critic | Fiction | The History Man EATING PEOPLE IS WRONG WELCOME BACK TO THE HISTORY MAN – FIRST COMMISSIONED BY THE SUNDAY TIMES, PUBLISHED IN LIAR'S LANDSCAPE Malcolm Bradbury Just over 30 years ago, I invented, for fictional purposes, a character who quite wonderfully turned into a long-lasting literary figure. His name was Howard Kirk, he was a radical university lecturer, and he appeared in a satirical novel called The History Man (1975). Howard, the 'history man,' then took on a splendid new lease of life when, after Mrs Thatcher had come to power, he was played by a magnetic and Zapata-moustached Anthony Sher in the BBC-TV dramatization of the story. I say I invented Howard Kirk, and yet no character ever came my way more naturally. He was an entirely familiar figure on every modern campus – if, like me, you happened to teach in one of those bright concrete-and-glass new universities that sprang up over the Sixties in Britain, and right across Europe and the USA. Most people then on campus knew a Howard Kirk.

He was the easy-going left-wing lecturer from the Swinging Sixties who had seen it happen, seen it fail, and had to live through what came next: the Sagging Seventies. Always radical, always seductive, always seducing, he was eternally on the side of the students against the fascistic institution that paid his salary, and always against those who were over thirty, even if he was himself 35. Howard believed in history, progressive history, and where it was inevitably leading us. As he said, if you wanted to understand, you needed to know a little Marx, a little Freud, and a little history. Yet the subject he taught wasn't history at all, but something vastly more 'trendy' (as everyone said then). Howard taught Sociology. And sociology was the most fashionable, radical and popular of all subjects in the academic canon of the day. In new universities like mine it acquired special place, as one of those inter-locking, inter-disciplinary subjects that allowed us to widen and re-integrate the great map of learning. It united philosophy, political science, anthropology, economics, history, cultural and popular studies, literature and art in a spirit of quasi-scientific objectivity.

It was high theory, the most conceptual of subjects – and yet it was data-based, empirical, very hands on. It was a master subject, offering an over-arching account of all social phenomena, entire historical epochs or ideologies – yet it was fascinated by the topical and the ephemeral. It was a 'value-free' approach to the world – yet it was also political. It stood beyond ideology, yet was a super-ideology. Sociology had a glorious heyday in the Sixties and then began to fragment and die -- not as a discipline among others, but as the great discipline, the key to all knowledge. In this process it seems I played a part. In an interesting article in the January issue of Prospect, "Return of Sociology," Ian Christie, deputy director of the think-tank Demos, says the turning point was clear. It was the appearance of The History Man in 1975 that led to the backlash against sociology, when "Bradbury's demolition of his anti-hero's hypocrisies and pretensions was hailed as though he headed up an army relieving a city beseiged by Marxist academics." In fact I had no armies, and even I don't believe novels make that kind of difference.

But out went the baby with the bathwater, says Christie, and sociology has not really recovered its authority since. ...... I would naturally be sorry to feel I alone had done such irremediable damage to a subject I respect and consider a major component of learning. Sociology, I would be among the first to say, is a distinguished, historical, and very European form of study, whose origins go back to the Enlightenment – like much else that is good. It was shaped by great thinkers – Rousseau, Hegel, Comte, Mill, Durkheim, Weber – and, for good or ill, has much to do with human progress and social understanding. Over the last two centuries, sociology sought to provide a comprehensive account of society, show models of how institutions work, compare ours and other societies. It studied class, race, gender and ideology. It considered how and under what determining influences people thought (sociology of knowledge) and how they believed (the sociology of religion). It explored suicide, alienation, anomie, sport and advertising. Yet something distinctive did happen to sociology between the 1950s and 1970s.

The subject reached its heyday, particularly in Britain and the USA, and then quickly ran off into its decline. What must have become obvious to all parties was this was a sociological phenomenon in itself. Why, then, did sociology achieve such a central role in Britain and the USA in the postwar years, and why did its pretensions collapse later? One explanation of the rise of sociology to its queen-bee role in the postwar map of learning was given by the left-wing American sociologist C. Wright Mills, author of influential books on the Power Elite and the Military-Industrial complex. In his 1959 book The Sociological Imagination, Mills claimed the sociological viewpoint was itself the product of the radical alienation that was one of the consequences of modernity. "Nowadays men often feel that their private lives are a series of traps," the book begins. The modern individual came to see the world as "an outsider, a permanent stranger." Individuals cease in the modern mass to feel like individuals; they feel themselves as part of a process, a mob.

They struggle to understand the history in which they're trapped, but it is beyond comprehension: "The history that now affects every man is world history." Mills proposes the 'sociological imagination' as a form of what we would call, in another hideous word culled from the wreckage, 'empowerment.' He was offering, in a sense, a form of Marxism without a manifesto, a social critique in the form of a science, a view of history where history already is powered with a well-guided sense of where it's supposed to go. Mills was right: his age had turned to the sociological viewpoint. It was the time of the embracing cultural analysis, the handy social textbook. Postwar society was different from pre-war, and required new reporting. In Britain, at this time, Richard Hoggart was publishing The Uses of Literacy, Raymond Williams' The Long Revolution, the New Left analyzing such forces of social change as youth culture, sport, pop music. In the Fifties USA popular sociology flourished, as if the New World was being discovered anew.

In the early 1950s David Riesman had published his remarkable study The Lonely Crowd, identifying a quite changed American identity in the age of urban mass society. Other key studies – such as Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders – portrayed Americans as docile, in the hands of commercial manipulators, deceived by their own leaders, driven to conformity and social consent. The 'sociological' reading of postwar society came after the massive crisis of world war and the growth of a new era of ideological conflict, the Cold War. The mid-century crisis left earlier political thought discredited: Fascism disgraced, Marxist theory in a state of Stalinist stupefaction. Ideology itself was challenged, yet the intellectual apparatus of ideology – the study of society, class and politics – was in demand. All over Europe, old societies were being reconstructed with new political orders. Old balances of power and borders of empire had collapsed. Newly emergent post-colonial societies were multiplying, some fledgling democracies, some various forms of peoples' republic.

Above all, a new social order based on commodified mass capitalism was evolving in conflict with an opposite order, and the world was being rapidly transformed by economic and ideological forces that were constantly in conflict. The Sixties Revolution was itself a confused radical paradox: Marxist utopian dreams were somehow to be financed by endless bourgeois wealth. It was never consistent, and both succeeded and failed. The great sociological syntheses of the 1950s and 1960s lost their inclusiveness and certainty. Society ceased to be the great wonderland and became, simply, the mess we're in. Popular radical sociology was an episode. It gave us much, not least the enquiring, relativistic spirit in which we now perceive our 'membership' in society. Despite the many claims it made, it did little to deepen or enrich the sense of society or social existence. The atomized, random, value-free, self-creating, hedonistic self of the Nineties is just as much the product of all that radical sociology as it is of some Thatcherite distrust of the very idea of society. Like most Enlightenment projects, the great enterprise became lost in its own ironies.

The idea that our cultural understanding needed to spread democratically from elite to popular culture has turned, in the hands of the media makers and programme controllers, into the great Nineties dumbing down. The ideological scepticism of the 1960s about the institution of the bourgeois family has given us the aimless modern household and the erosion of the ethical and self-responsible individual. In short, the radical, Marxizing, counter-cultural sociology of the 60s has largely provided much of the ideological and moral framework of postmodern consumer capitalism. Ian Christie suggests the time is ripe for a return to sociology, and proposes that the 'defeat' of the 1970s is being reversed. I hope he's right. It is one of the paradoxes of our time that a society that is heavy with social self-description and self-documentation is so bad at defining the larger level of its moral, familial and community dilemmas. In a number of recent books – he mentions Conversations with Anthony Giddens – Christie sees a return to serious debate about the nature and the workings of society.

Yet he also notes we do not yet have the enquivalent among contemporary sociologists to a Richard Dawkins or a Stephen Jay Gould, the large thinking figures who construct a significant relationship with theory and practice for an entire discipline. As Christie sees, if sociology is to make its return, it will have to swim outside the think-tanks, and recover some of that grand intellectual energy that delighted us thirty years ago – when the likes of David Riesman, Talcott Parsons, Richard Titmuss and Jurgen Habermass could make us understand the power and wonder of the idea of society, the mysteriousness of history. Howard Kirk was a rogue of rogues, but at least he believed that. No doubt in 1979 he would have voted for Thatcher, and in 1997 for Blair. He would be enjoying his vice-chancellorship at Batley Canalside University, and the life peerage has been a source of the greatest pleasure. But at least Howard believed – even if it was chiefly for his own advantage – in all the things that still do matter. He believed in history, society, philosophy, ideas, human progress, mental discovery, all that's left of the Enlightenment Project.

As for his recent books, The Prospects for the ECU, Or How Europe Got Rich has done well this Christmas, and so has his Brief History of Football. The history men are not often sociologists these days. As for me, the ones I read are the Linda Colleys, the Norman Davies, or the new theorists in genetics or earth science. The fact remains that, if Ian Christie can find the published evidence that can persuade me, I shall be as delighted to hail the revival of sociology as I was sad to attend its fall. The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury · OverDrive: eBooks, audiobooks and videos for libraries Fiction Literature 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 those involved: 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 and the definitive campus novel of the 1970s.

It brilliantly satirizes a world of academic power struggles and abuse at the highest level as the Machiavellian Howard effortlessly seduces his way around campus. Adobe EPUB eBook 365.7 KB Malcolm Bradbury (Author) Malcolm Bradbury was a well-known novelist, critic and academic, and founder of the creative writing department at the University of East Anglia. He was the author of seven novels, including The History Man and Rates of Exchange, which was shortli... Professor Malcolm Bradbury - Literature Literature Curtis Brown Group Ltd Biography Academic, novelist, screenwriter and playwright Malcolm Bradbury was born in Sheffield on 7 September 1932 and educated at West Bridgford Grammar School in Nottingham, the University of Leicester and Queen Mary's College in London. In 1959 he began a Ph.D. in American Studies at Manchester University, published his first novel, Eating People is Wrong, and began a distinguished academic career at teaching at Hull University.

He taught English at the University of Birmingham in the early 1960s and began lecturing at the University of East Anglia in 1965 on English and American studies, setting up the acclaimed creative writing course with Sir Angus Wilson which has produced many eminent contemporary writers, including Booker Prize for Fiction winners Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro. Malcolm Bradbury was made Professor of American Studies in 1970, Emeritus Professor in 1995.Malcolm Bradbury was a prolific writer of novels, short stories, literary criticism and television plays and series. His most famous novels satirised university life, including The History Man (1975), winner of the Heinemann Award and adapted for television starring Anthony Sher as the Marxist lecturer Howard Kirk. Malcolm Bradbury was Chairman of Judges for the 1981 Booker Prize for Fiction, and his fourth novel, Rates of Exchange was shortlisted for the prize in 1983. His most recent novel To the Hermitage was published in 2000 and was considered by many critics to be his best work of fiction.Malcolm Bradbury lectured throughout the world and his books have been translated into many languages.

He wrote many original radio and television plays, and adapted several novels for television including Tom Sharpe's Blott on the Landscape and Porterhouse Blue, Alison Lurie's Imaginary Friends and Kingsley Amis's The Green Man. His critical work includes The Modern British Novel (1994) and The Modern American Novel (1984).Malcolm Bradbury was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1976 and was awarded a CBE in the 1991. He married Elizabeth Salt in 1959, with whom he had two sons, and lived in Norwich until his sudden death on 27 November 2000. The History Man : Malcolm Bradbury : 9781447222811 Malcolm Bradbury Contemporary Fiction Review quote '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 show more About Malcolm Bradbury Malcolm Bradbury was a well-known novelist, critic and academic, and founder of the creative writing department at the University of East Anglia.

He was the author of seven novels, including The History Man and Rates of Exchange, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He was awarded a knighthood in 2000 and died the same year. show more Follow us Howard Kirk | University of Watermouth | ZoomInfo.com University of Watermouth + Get 10 Free Contacts a Month Please agree to the terms and conditions I agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . I understand that I will receive a subscription to ZoomInfo Grow at no charge in exchange for downloading and installing the ZoomInfo Contact Contributor utility which, among other features, involves sharing my business contacts as well as headers and signature blocks from emails that I receive. Web References (4 Total References) MALCOLM BRADBURY writer & critic | Fiction | Introductory Essay [cached] Bernie Froelich, the sly plotter of Stepping Westward, who manipulates the innocent Walker to further his own interests, is a precursor of Howard Kirk, the machiavellian left-wing sociologist at the new University of Watermouth in the south of England, who finds that the plot of history according to Marx coincides neatly with his own desires for possession and domination of other people.

LTC Blog [cached] Howard Kirk is a successful, manipulative and promiscuous sociologist at the new University of Watermouth ... A master of faculty politics, seducer of women, wearer of a Zapata mustache, Kirk manages to get a racist geneticist invited to speak on campus just so he was a radical university lecturer, and he appeared in a satirical novel called The History Man (1975). Howard, the 'history man,' then took on a splendid new lease of life when, after Mrs Thatcher had come to power, he was played by a magnetic and Zapata-moustached Anthony Sher in the BBC-TV dramatization of the story. I say I invented Howard Kirk, and yet no character ever came my way more naturally. He was an entirely familiar figure on every modern campus - if, like me, you happened to teach in one of those bright concrete-and-glass new universities that sprang up over the Sixties in Britain, and right across Europe and the USA. Most people then on campus knew a Howard Kirk. He was the easy-going left-wing lecturer from the Swinging Sixties who had seen it happen, seen it fail, and had to live through what came next: the Sagging Seventies.

Always radical, always seductive, always seducing, he was eternally on the side of the students against the fascistic institution that paid his salary, and always against those who were over thirty, even if he Howard believed in history, progressive history, and where it was inevitably leading us. As he said, if you wanted to understand, you needed to know a little Marx, a little Freud, and a little history. Yet the subject he taught wasn't history at all, but something vastly more 'trendy' (as everyone said then). Howard taught Sociology. ... Howard Kirk was a rogue of rogues, but at least he believed that. No doubt in 1979 he would have voted for Thatcher, and in 1997 for Blair. He would be enjoying his vice-chancellorship at Batley Canalside University, and the life peerage has been a source of the greatest pleasure. But at least Howard believed - even if it was chiefly for his own advantage - in all the things that still do matter. He believed in history, society, philosophy, ideas, human progress, mental discovery, all that's left of the Enlightenment Project.

Starring Antony Sher as David Lodge on Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man | Books | The Guardian Share on Messenger Close The title of Malcolm Bradbury's third novel, published in 1975, has become a proverbial phrase, invoked in journalistic headlines and echoed by other writers (eg Alan Bennett's The History Boys) without any thematic reference to its source. To understand why The History Man impressed itself so deeply on the British collective consciousness and the English language, the novel itself must be placed in its historical context - or contexts (for there were two). Bradbury is often labelled a "campus novelist", but in his work, as in all the best examples of the genre, the small world of the university is a stage for the dramatisation and examination of larger issues. The History Man is set almost entirely in and around the University of Watermouth, a fictitious town on the south coast of England, but it dealt with an international phenomenon, the movement for revolutionary change in social, political and cultural life which erupted in western Europe and the United States in the late 1960s, and set the progressive agenda until it ran out of steam at the end of the 70s.

It was a complex phenomenon, made up of many different elements from Marxism and Maoism to rock music and recreational drugs, but it was essentially a rebellion of youth against a patriarchal old order, largely inspired by middle-aged gurus, and launched from the expanding universities of the post-war world. I dealt with the phenomenon in a fairly light-hearted way in my own novel Changing Places: a tale of two campuses, published in the same year as The History Man. Bradbury's take on it was darker and more troubled. The University of East Anglia, to which he moved from Birmingham (where we were colleagues) in 1966, was one of several new residential universities built in England in the 1960s on landscaped sites at the edge of cathedral cities and county towns. At the time they were seen as exciting and trendy places, committed to educational innovation, and therefore especially open to the influence of the new counterculture. But all institutions of higher education were affected. Students, herded together and suddenly removed from parental control, were ripe for ideological awakening and sexual experiment, which sometimes turned into indoctrination and exploitation by their teachers.

Bradbury observed this scene with a satirical relish for its absurdities and contradictions, and a sombre concern about its social and cultural effects - in particular its programmatic rejection of the values which he held dear: respect for the individual, moral responsibility for one's actions, social progress through consensus rather than conflict and what one of the remnants of liberal humanism in the novel, Henry Beamish, calls rather mystically, "the attachment of knowable people and the gentleness of relationship". The action of the novel is placed very precisely in 1972, just when the first flush of enthusiasm for the late-60s revolution began to fade, and those who had hitched their wagon to that Zeitgeist were concerned to keep its momentum going. One such is the central character, a sociology lecturer in his early 30s called Howard Kirk. Sociology was the key humanities discipline of the time, especially in the new universities, and well adapted to mediate the new progressive ideas.

Literature departments were just as hospitable to the counterculture, and as internally divided about it, but the chief opponent of Kirk's views in the novel, and spokeswoman for "liberalism, humanism, and moral responsibility", is a lecturer in English literature: Annie Callendar. It is she who identifies Kirk, in academic shorthand, as "a history man". In The Poverty of Historicism (1961) the philosopher Karl Popper defined historicism as "an approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is their principal aim, and which assumes that this aim is attainable by discovering the 'rhythms', the 'patterns', the 'laws' or the 'trends' that underlie the evolution of history". Marxism is the most obvious modern exemplar of this kind of thinking, and it is the chief though not the only source of inspiration for Howard Kirk's radicalism. The words "history" and "inevitable" are constantly on his lips. He believes the plot of history has just entered a critical phase from which a new world of human freedom and possibility will be born, and that it is his duty to help it along by some smaller-scale plots of his own.

Conveniently, this mission coincides with his inexhaustible appetite for intrigue, control, and sexual conquest. The History Man disconcerted many readers who had enjoyed the more genial comedy of Bradbury's previous novels. Even those who admired it did not find it a comfortable or comforting book, while those who resisted and rejected its implications found they could not put it down. The discomfort was caused by the fact that there is no character with whom the reader can happily identify, and no authorial assistance in the task of interpretation and judgment. The book's power to grip even the resistant reader is the product of a tightly constructed narrative and a distinctive, strangely hypnotic verbal style. This is how it begins: Now it is the autumn again; the people are all coming back. The recess of summer is over, when holidays are taken, newspapers shrink, history itself seems momentarily to falter and stop. But the papers are thickening and filling again; things seem to be happening; back from Corfu and Sete, Positano and Leningrad, the people are parking their cars and campers in their drives, and opening their diaries, and calling up other people on the telephone . . .

Everywhere there are new developments, new indignities; the intelligent people survey the autumn world, and liberal and radical hackles rise, and fresh faces are about, and the sun shines fitfully, and the telephones ring. So, sensing the climate, some people called the Kirks, a well-known couple, decide to have a party. This is the authorial voice - knowing, sardonic, and educated, but also detached, impersonal, opaque. The narration here, and throughout most of the novel, is in the present tense, not like a story-teller recounting something that has already happened, but more like the verbal equivalent of a movie camera, tracking the characters through space and time into an unknown future. If you open the book at random you see dense blocks of print in which descriptive sentences and dialogue are packed together without interpretive commentary or the presentation of the characters' private thoughts and feelings in free indirect style.

When he wakes on the morning after the party, "In Howard's head is a dry image of a person: Felicity Phee, a mottling of spots above her breasts." But that is as far as we are allowed to see into Howard's mind: we don't discover what he thinks about having had sex with his student the night before. The passage proceeds: He activates muscular mechanisms; he gets out of bed and walks, through the party detritus and the unredeemed daylight, to the bathroom. He urinates into the bowl; he takes his razor from the medicine cabinet, and unravels the cord. He plugs the razor into two black holes under the white globe of the light. There are hundreds of sentences like these. They are largely purged of metaphor (which means that any hint of it, as in "unredeemed" and "black holes", has a powerful effect) and completely lacking in what rhetoricians call "elegant variation," the avoidance of verbal and syntactical repetition.

The style of the book is full of deliberate repetition, sometimes taken to extreme lengths - "The floors are being cleaned by a cleaner with a cleaner." The unsettling absence of depth or interiority in the narrative mimics the negation, implicit in Howard's deterministic ideology, of the individual human consciousness on which liberal humanism is founded. This doesn't mean that the novel is empty of thoughts, feelings, anxieties and desires. The characters talk about such things obsessively. Why does Howard's friend and colleague Henry Beamish have so many accidents? Why does his wife Myra want to leave him? Why is Barbara Kirk unhappy? What does Felicity Phee want from Howard? Why is he such a compulsive philanderer? These questions are addressed continually in dialogue between the characters, but their answers conflict, or are self-contradictory, and none is privileged. The reader must pick and choose among them in forming his or her own interpretation of the story. The action takes place mainly in the first week of the autumn term.

We see Kirk presiding over his party like a Lord of Misrule, beginning his exploitative affair with Felicity Phee while continuing to sleep with his colleague Flora Beniform and endeavouring to bed Miss Callendar, plotting a totally factitious protest movement on campus and discriminating outrageously against a student of conservative views. When it seems that this last action will bring about his own downfall, Kirk goes in search of the student's ally, Annie Callendar. He seeks out the man who had brought her to his party, "a depressed-looking figure who, ten years earlier, had produced two tolerably well-known and acceptably reviewed novels, filled, as novels then were, with moral scruple and concern". The novelist (no prizes for guessing his identity) refuses to tell Howard where she lives, but he tracks her down in her old-fashioned flat and seduces her in her old-fashioned bed. She is hesitant, reluctant, but ultimately willing. No single element in The History Man provoked more discussion and disagreement among its readers than Annie Callendar's capitulation to Howard Kirk. Feminists and traditional moralists were equally disappointed or outraged by it. Couples quarrelled about it.

What gave offence to many was that a character who is presented as satisfying his own ego under guise of supporting a collective revolution does not get his comeuppance, as the development of the plot seems to promise, but is allowed to escape punishment and even to triumph at the end of the story. By this, I take it, Bradbury meant to imply that liberal humanism, with its built-in tolerance and self-doubt, is always vulnerable to those who are convinced they have a monopoly of the truth; but perhaps too there is an acknowledgement that the representatives of liberal humanism in the novel are a pretty spineless lot, and a grudging admiration for Kirk's energy and determination to make things happen. The novel was not an instant success when first published. It divided reviewers, some of whom did not get the point of its style. It was not shortlisted for the Booker prize and it was not a bestseller. It was written against the grain of the times, and the bien pensants, however much they secretly relished its satirical wit, were reluctant to approve it publicly. But gradually it was recognised as one of the key books of the 1970s.

And then, at the beginning of the next decade, it had a second lease of life and reached a much wider audience, thanks to television. In 1981 the BBC aired a four-part mini-series very faithfully and skilfully adapted by Christopher Hampton. It proved to be a landmark in British TV drama, and made a little-known young actor called Antony Sher a star in the leading role, but it was received in a political climate very different from when the novel was written and published. Mrs Thatcher's Conservatives had won the General Election of 1979, and embarked on a political programme which sought to reverse everything the Kirks and their friends stood for. The radical Right was now in the ascendant, and its pundits welcomed The History Man as a confirmation that left-wing academics were corrupting the minds of the young. The universities were subjected to savage cuts in public funding in the 1980s, and sociology in particular fell into disfavour. A writer in Prospect magazine in January 1999 traced the decline of sociology as an academic subject back to The History Man. In short, Malcolm Bradbury's critique of left-wing radicalism from a liberal humanist position was appropriated and vulgarised by right-wing radicalism.

Bradbury himself deplored and disowned this application of his story, and the producers of the television serial, as if nervously anticipating such a reaction, appended a footnote to the credits at the end of the last episode: "Howard Kirk voted Conservative in the General Election of 1979", though this seems highly improbable. The meanings of fictions cannot be so easily revised or controlled. It is hard to disentangle the reception of the novel from the reception of the television version, but one good effect of the latter was to prompt many more people to read the former, and to establish it firmly as a modern classic. The counterculture radicalism which the novel anatomised is now itself history, as is (in Britain at least) the right-wing radicalism which superseded it. But today there are new forms of radicalism, fundamentalisms of various kinds, and The History Man is still relevant, warning of what can happen when, in the words of WB Yeats, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." Malcolm Bradbury (Author of The History Man) edit data Sir Malcolm Stanley Bradbury CBE was an English author and academic.

He is best known to a wider public as a novelist. Although he is often compared with David Lodge, his friend and a contemporary as a British exponent of the campus novel genre, Bradbury's books are consistently darker in mood and less playful both in style and language. His best known novel The History Man, published in 1975, is a dark satire of academic life in the "glass and steel" universities – the then-fashionable newer universities of England that had followed their "redbrick" predecessors – which in 1981 was made into a successful BBC television serial. The protagonist is the hypocritical Howard Kirk, a sociology professor at the fictional University of Watermouth. H Sir Malcolm Stanley Bradbury CBE was an English author and academic. He is best known to a wider public as a novelist. Although he is often compared with David Lodge, his friend and a contemporary as a British exponent of the campus novel genre, Bradbury's books are consistently darker in mood and less playful both in style and language.

His best known novel The History Man, published in 1975, is a dark satire of academic life in the "glass and steel" universities – the then-fashionable newer universities of England that had followed their "redbrick" predecessors – which in 1981 was made into a successful BBC television serial. The protagonist is the hypocritical Howard Kirk, a sociology professor at the fictional University of Watermouth. He completed his PhD in American studies at the University of Manchester in 1962, moving to the University of East Anglia (his second novel, Stepping Westward, appeared in 1965), where he became Professor of American Studies in 1970 and launched the world-renowned MA in Creative Writing course, which Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro both attended. He published Possibilities: Essays on the State of the Novel in 1973, The History Man in 1975, Who Do You Think You Are? in 1976, Rates of Exchange in 1983, Cuts: A Very Short Novel in 1987, retiring from academic life in 1995.

Malcolm Bradbury became a Commander of the British Empire in 1991 for services to Literature, and was made a Knight Bachelor in the New Year Honours 2000, again for services to Literature. Bradbury was a productive academic writer as well as a successful teacher; an expert on the modern novel, he published books on Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow and E. M. Forster, as well as editions of such modern classics as F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and a number of surveys and handbooks of modern fiction, both British and American. He also wrote extensively for television, including scripting series such as Anything More Would Be Greedy, The Gravy Train, the sequel The Gravy Train Goes East (which explored life in Bradbury's fictional Slaka), and adapting novels such as Tom Sharpe's Blott on the Landscape and Porterhouse Blue, Alison Lurie's Imaginary Friends and Kingsley Amis's The Green Man. His last television script was for Dalziel and Pascoe series 5 Produced by Andy Rowley. The episode 'Foreign Bodies was screened on BBC One on July 15 2000.

...more Malcolm Bradbury Malcolm Bradbury ( 1932 - 2000 ) Sir Malcolm Stanley Bradbury CBE was an English author and academic. He is best known to a wider public as a novelist. Although he is often compared with David Lodge, his friend and a contemporary as a British exponent of the campus novel genre, Bradbury's books are consistently darker in mood and less playful both in style and language. His best known novel The History Man, published in 1975, is a dark satire of academic life in the "glass and steel" universities the then-fashionable newer universities of England that had followed their "redbrick" predecessors which in 1981 was made into a successful BBC television serial. The protagonist is the hypocritical Howard Kirk, a sociology professor at the fictional University of Watermouth.

MALCOLM BRADBURY writer & critic | Fiction | Introductory Essay EATING PEOPLE IS WRONG INTRODUCTORY ESSAY – ORIGINAL VERSION PUBLISHED IN THE BRITISH COUNCIL SERIES, CONTEMPORARY WRITERS, UPDATED 2010 David Lodge Like several English novelists before him, Malcolm Bradbury began his literary career writing humorous and parodic sketches of contemporary life in magazines like Punch. This literary apprenticeship left its mark on his novels and stories, which are notable for their sharp, witty and densely specific observation of contemporary manners and morals, fads and fashions. The fact that most of these fictions are set in the academic world or have academics as their principal characters does not limit their representativeness. Read in chronological sequence, they constitute a satirical social history of post-war Britain. They also reflect developments, seen through British eyes, in the two great empires of the second half of the 20th century, the American and the Soviet Russian, which Bradbury observed on his academic travels. These novels have a dimension of serious - indeed pessimistic - moral and philosophical reflection.

Every now and then the brittle, amusing social surface cracks open to reveal dark and disturbing depths: violence, treachery, madness, despair. Bradbury used the conventions of the "campus novel" to develop the combination of comedy of manners and moral seriousness which he found in the modern British novelists he most admired, E.M. Forster and Evelyn Waugh. He also learned from contemporary American writers - not surprisingly, in view of his academic specialization in American Literature. His first novel, Eating People Is Wrong (1959) owed as much to the intellectually sophisticated fiction of Lionel Trilling, Mary McCarthy and Saul Bellow as it did to Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim (1954). Like Amis, however, and other British campus novelists, Bradbury also drew on a native tradition of robust farce that goes back to Fielding, Smollett and Sterne in the eighteenth century. Rather unusually for a young writer's first novel, Eating People Is Wrong has a 40 year-old hero, Professor Treece, Head of English at a provincial redbrick university.

This allows Treece to represent a theme that consistently fascinated Bradbury, the liberal's sense of being an impotent spectator of, and at times an involuntary collaborator in, the cultural decline which he observes going on around him. Treece finds the brash, socially mobile Britain of the 1950s, where university teachers vandalise the learned journals in their own common rooms, a distracting and demoralizing climate in which to cultivate beauty and truth, but fails to live up to his own high ideals. Succumbing irresponsibly to the charms of a pretty postgraduate, he drives an unstable but gifted student into madness and is punished by his own comically horrendous hospitalization in the last chapter. In Stepping Westward (1965), Bradbury dispatched a similarly weak liberal hero, a provincial novelist called James Walker, to be writer-in-residence on a campus in the middle of America, where he proves quite incapable of reading the political plot in which he becomes involved. Full of brilliantly epigrammatic dialogue and acute observation of British and American manners, Stepping Westward was an important transitional novel on the way to the masterly The History Man (1975).

Bernie Froelich, the sly plotter of Stepping Westward, who manipulates the innocent Walker to further his own interests, is a precursor of Howard Kirk, the machiavellian left-wing sociologist at the new University of Watermouth in the south of England, who finds that the plot of history according to Marx coincides neatly with his own desires for possession and domination of other people. It helps that the cultural and sexual revolution which started in the 1960s is now in full swing, discomposing Howard's accident-prone colleague Henry Beamish, the prim Scottish lecturer Miss Callendar, and the novelist himself, who makes a thinly disguised appearance towards the end of the story. Technically, this novel marked a major innovative development in Bradbury's work. There is no internalization in the treatment of character. The fictional discourse scrupulously restricts itself to the subtly cadenced representation of speech and behaviour, reported in a present tense that renounces any claim to wisdom after the event. The reader is compelled to make his or her own assessment of the ethics and motives of the characters, without having any privileged access to their thoughts or guidance from a reassuring authorial voice.

Dr Petworth, the much-travelled linguistics lecturer in Rates of Exchange (1983) resembles the weak liberal heroes of the first two novels. As the beautiful Slakan magic realist novelist Katya Princip tells him, he is not "a character in the world-historical sense". His very name is subject to ludicrous mutation - Petwurt, Prevert, Pervert etc,, -- on the lips of his hosts in the mythical East European Communist state, Slaka. This is a richly imagined synthesis of several Balkan and Slavic countries for which Bradbury invented a whole new language full of delightful verbal humour. Superficially, the fun is at the expense of the Slakans; on closer inspection they emerge with more credit and dignity from the story than their English visitor, who comes to accept that Katya Princip's tale about a young folk hero called Stupid is his own fable of identity. In a political climate where discourse is a matter of life and death, Petworth's professional tinkering with linguistic theory is made to seem dilettante.

By the time of Dr Criminale (1992) the Berlin Wall has fallen, Communism is dead, and a more fluid and confusing cultural world has evolved. Bradbury takes as his subject the international intellectual superstar, personified in a fictional character who reminds us of real thinkers like George Lukï¿½cs and Paul de Man. The structure of the novel is picaresque: Francis Jay, a young English arts journalist, is commissioned to research the life of Bazlo Criminale, omnipresent conference keynote speaker and versatile theorist of a multitude of disciplines, for a mooted TV documentary. But the man proves curiously elusive, and the closer Francis gets to his quarry as he pursues him round the globe the more darkly ambiguous Criminale's personal and ideological history, on both sides of the old Iron Curtain, appears. In the end we are invited to admire the dexterity with which he used his intelligence to survive the brutality of 20th century history.

Bradbury's last completed novel, To The Hermitage (2000), was a change of direction: a historical novel about the time the French philosophe Denis Diderot spent in Russia at the invitation of Catherine the Great in 1773-4 , spliced with a satirical account of modern academics conducting a floating seminar about Diderot on a cruise ship bound for St Petersberg, narrated by one of them, who is obviously Malcolm Bradbury. Like Diderot, who imitated Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy in his Jacques the Fatalist, the narrator of To the Hermitage teases the reader with witty Shandean digressions and metafictional jokes. Complex, ambitious, and many-layered, To the Hermitage must not be hurried if it is to be enjoyed. The moving description of Diderot's decline and death in this novel acquired an extra poignancy from the circumstance that Malcolm Bradbury died in the year it was published.

Among the literary projects he left unfinished was a large fragment of another historical novel about the French Romantic writer Chateaubriand, called Liar's Landscape (it is included in the posthumous collection of his writing published under that title in 2006). To the end of his life Malcolm was fascinated by the relations between fiction and truth, and looking for new ways to explore this theme. In concluding this brief survey, I refer to him finally by his first name alone, to gesture to a personal friendship and professional indebtedness too extensive to describe here. (I have written about it elsewhere, in the Afterword to Liar's Landscape.) © David Lodge

Question: Howard Kirk is the fictional university lecturer in which Malcolm Bradbury novel?
Answer: The History Man