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Information About

Malcolm Bradbury





LIFE

Born in . Malcolm Bradbury became a Commander Of The British Empire in 1991 for services to Literature, and was knighted in 2000 .


WORKS

Bradbury was a productive academic writer as well as a successful teacher; an expert on the modern Novel , he published books on Evelyn Waugh 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. However, 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. In 1986 he wrote a short humorous book titled ''Why Come to Slaka?'', a parody of travel books, dealing with the fictional Eastern European country that is the setting for his novel ''Rates of Exchange''.

He also wrote extensively for Television , including scripting series such as '' Anything More Would Be Greedy '' and '' The Gravy Train '', 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''.


Fiction


''The History Man''

See Also: The History Man


His best known novel, ''The History Man'', published in ( 1975 ), is a dark satire of academic life in the "glass and steel universities" that followed their "redbrick" predecessors (the then fashionable newer universities of England); in 1981 it was made into a successful BBC television serial. The protagonist is the hypocritical Howard Kirk, a sociology professor at the fictional University of Watermouth.


''Cuts''

Commissioned by Hutchinson as part of their Hutchinson Novella series, ''Cuts'' was published in 1987 . It used a host of plays on the word 'cuts' to mock the values of Thatcherist Britain in 1986 and the world of television drama production in which Bradbury had become involved after the adaptation of ''The History Man''. Bradbury derided the philistinism of television executives who wanted to capture the market of '' Brideshead Revisited '' and '' The Jewel In The Crown '' at impossibly low cost. He also explored the low esteem accorded writers in the hierarchy of television production.



BIBLIOGRAPHY (INCOMPLETE)

  • ''The After Dinner Game''

  • ''All Dressed Up and Nowhere To Go''

  • ''Eating People is Wrong'' ( 1959 )

  • ''Stepping Westward'' ( 1968 )

  • ''The Social Context of Modern English Literature'' ( 1971 )

  • ''Who Do You Think You Are'' — a collection of short stories

  • ''The History Man'' ( 1975 )

  • ''Rates of Exchange''

  • ''To the Hermitage''

  • ''Mensonge''

  • ''The Modern American Novel'' ( 1983 )

  • ''Why Come to Slaka?'' ( 1986 )

  • ''Cuts'' ( 1987 ) — a Hutchinson Novella

  • ''Doctor Criminale'' ( 1992 )

  • ''The Modern British Novel'' ( 1993 )

  • ''Dangerous Pilgrimages: Trans-Atlantic Mythologies and the Novel'' ( 1995 )



QUOTE

  • ''If God had been a liberal, we wouldn't have had the Ten Commandments; we'd have the Ten Suggestions''



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