It is the summer of 1986 and the cutting, trimming and shrinking of public funds is much in the news. Education, health, the arts - all are being deprived of money. But while the university where the obscure but critically sound writer Henry Babbacombe teaches is having to cut down on staff, a northern television company is having a last spree before the money runs out. And who should they choose for their writer but Henry Babbacombe? Wrenched from the privacy and seclusion of his garden shed into the spotlight of the media, Henry learns a thing or two about what it takes to be successful in Mrs Thatcher's Britain.

Cuts

In seven short stories Malcolm Bradbury takes a subtly ironic look at a variety of targets: American academics, provincial Britain, the aspirations of social workers, psychologists, the well-intentioned.

Who Do You Think You Are?

Forty-year-old university professor Stuart Treece is rather set in his ways, and in the midst of the changing attitudes of the '50s, his encounters with the younger generation are making him feel decidedly alien. When he falls disastrously in love with one of his students all his efforts to acclimatize are hilariously undermined. Timeless and brilliant, Eating People is Wrong is Malcolm Bradbury's first novel, and established him as a master of satire.

Eating People is Wrong

At the end of the 1950s, a debonair and well-dressed Malcolm Bradbury returned from a year in the United States, slightly shattered but not quite broken, to a Britain that had thoroughly changed. Commercial television had started, the bee-hive hairdo was in, and there were supermarkets instead of grocer's shops. In this piece of vintage Bradbury, the author of The History Man takes on Consumer Society and the British character as only he can.'He restores belief in the power of laughter' Harpers & Queen'A master not only of language and comedy but of feeling too' Sunday Times

All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go

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 Bazlo Criminale proves almost impossible to penetrate, but Jay doggedly pursues the doctor from congress to congress, from woman to woman and from muse to muse: just who is the mysterious Criminale? Written after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Doctor Criminale shows a world where old ideologies are coming apart at the seams.

Doctor Criminale

Automne 1972. Howard Kirk est un activiste bien connu, professeur de sociologie à l'université, pédagogue révolutionnaire : un homme libre et moderne. Il publie des livres à succès sur la fin des valeurs traditionnelles, couche avec ses collègues et ses étudiantes, organise des fêtes désorganisées, persécute les réactionnaires, et ne fait pas confiance aux gens de plus de trente ans. Mais cette rentrée s'annonce trop calme et consensuelle à son gout : l'université a besoin d'action. Et son indignation a besoin d'une cause. Il fait donc courir la rumeur que l'université veut inviter le professeur Mangel, un grand généticien honni des radicaux, à donner une conférence. La rumeur enfle, les débats s'enveniment, et Mangel se voit effectivement invité. Howard Kirk va pouvoir briller, faire interdire cette conférence, et devenir, enfin, le plus radical des radicaux.

L'homme à Histoire

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. 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 .

The History Man - Picador Classic

Malcolm Bradbury, né le 7 septembre 1932 à Sheffield (Royaume-Uni) et mort le 28 novembre 2000 à Norwich (Royaume-Uni), est un universitaire, écrivain et scénariste britannique.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Bradbury

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