Malcolm Bradbury sends up the 1950s "provincial" [15 occurrences] English university department and "liberal" [27 occurrences] faculty entertainingly, but I found the situations and humour painfully dated in this novel of inward-looking postwar English academic attitudes and experiences. To my mind, the novels of his friend David Lodge reflect more enduring character types and contexts. ( )

A very funny novel about a small college in a provincial Britain. As is usual in this sort of novel there is a collection of more or less eccentric students and professors who interact professionally and amorously. The novel stands up over time in spite of a great deal of somewhat dated and topical humor. Professor Treece and a social-misfit student, Louis Bates both ultimately are defeated by society and, by the end, seemed doomed to unhappy lives. ( )

Acquired via BookCrossing 30 May 2009 - from Julie & Barry's boxes for BookCrossing

I picked this one out of the boxes as I have enjoyed reading The History Man a couple of times. This was a great read - hilarious goings-on in the English Dept of a provincial University. It probably helps if you've *been* in an English dept but the general academic atmosphere makes it a funny read on many levels. Treece is an excellent 1950s anti-hero and the goings on at parties etc makes for wince-worthy and unputdownable reading. The atmosphere changed a bit towards the end but still a good read. Interesting afterword by the author but he doesn't answer the question - is the truly dreadful Willoughby a portrait of David Lodge, his friend and rival in real life, or is it an amalgam of a few people?! ( )

This was Malcolm Bradbury's first novel, published six years after Kingsley Amis had set the pattern for redbrick campus novels with Lucky Jim. Like Lucky Jim, this is set in a small, provincial university town where students and academics are torn between their inherent middle-class respectability and a feeling that they ought to be rebelling against something. Bradbury takes the whole thing a lot less seriously than Amis, and at times, particularly when a ludicrously badly-behaved poet comes to address the local literary society, he is clearly having a bit of fun sending up the whole "angry young man" idea. On the other hand, there are some telling lines, as when the poet points out that the trouble with English poetry is that there are more people writing it than reading it (something that is still true today!).

Obviously, any novel that takes its title from a Flanders and Swann song is ipso facto worth reading, but it might come as a shock to readers who've started out with Bradbury's most famous novel, The history man, to find themselves plunged back into this very 1950s world, where motor scooters and espresso machines are the bleeding edge of innovation, and people wear duffel coats, go to dances at the town hall, and turn up at parties with bottles labelled "British wine, port type". It's worth persevering with, though: there are a lot of good things to discover along the way. ( )