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“... best qualities of his short stories. But it is not in the same class as its predecessor, Falconer. Malcolm Bradbury once described Cheever as ‘somewhere between Scott Fitzgerald and John Updike’, and for nearly all of his writing except Falconer this is fair. Mostly Cheever wrote of the lives, loves and manners of suburban America, particularly the ...”

“... to build a bridge to Medieval literature, may have the effect for some readers of distancing it. Malcolm Bradbury’s series of monographs on modern authors sounds more positively convinced of the virtue of setting literature in period. It is boldly built upon a series of premises which tie texts to contexts; books of the Sixties and the ...”

“... Coward called Flaubert’s Parrot ‘a Modernist text with a 19th-century heart’. By contrast Malcolm Bradbury, in The Modern British Novel, claims that – with its game with notions of the real and the fictional, its making its own rules and its breaking up of its own discourse – it is ‘a Post-Modern “text” indeed’. But leaving aside the ...”

“... fields. Needless to say, these experiments ‘had their correlatives in literature’ – in Malcolm Bradbury, as it isn’t perhaps needless to say, and Martin Amis. Perhaps there is wisdom in Howard Brenton’s observation that what binds us together in this period is nothing more than ‘a profound unease’. It is here, approaching the end of ...”

“... although, as I see it, justice could be done to them only by a writer like David Lodge or Malcolm Bradbury. It seems evident to me that their work is for the most part based on a very small element of truth whose significance is inflated out of all proportion, that facts buttressing the case are carefully selected, and all the evidence that does ...”

“... mind: friends lost, loves lost, lesbian affairs lost, age, death, futility. To paraphrase Malcolm Bradbury on Woolf, she could be thinking of eternity, or she could be thinking of potatoes. Lucas is torn between reading these female writers as representative of gender trouble and testing their class-consciousness: while the ‘sharply ...”

“... and to be distinguished from the campus novels (more academic, not so upper-class) of, say, Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge. Miles Tattershall lectures, with moderate success, in 17th-century literature at Cambridge. He, too, is conventional, in so far as conventions exist for fictional men of letters. Like Nick Jenkins in Anthony Powell’s ...”

“... it, any of it.It used to be more interesting. In 1993, Keele still bore a resemblance to the world Malcolm Bradbury captured in The History Man (1975): lecturers taught whatever enthused them – one medievalist offered a course on the Holocaust – and the cooler professors held parties to which students were invited. There were eccentrics straight out ...”

“... essay, Hill does make his attack on the ‘vast apparatus of Opinion’ more specific, criticising Malcolm Bradbury and Christopher Bigsby for presenting Margaret Drabble and John Le Carré as ‘most important writers’. He goes on to reproach the same critics for appealing to a ‘supposed consensus’ and for the use of the phrase ‘our ...”

“... shapes up as if it is going to be a rather conventional and thoroughly English novel of the kind Malcolm Bradbury describes as chronicling the female orgasm in Hampstead for female readers in Hampstead. The heroine, Jennifer Hamilton (carried over from Emerson’s first novel, Second Sight), is a bright, young and pretty lady of letters. In the ...”

“... Thirty years ago, the campus novels of David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury mythologised a setting that expressed, better than any other, the cultural and ideological chaos of the 1960s and 1970s. The main characters were rarely students, but all the energy in these comedies of social transition flowed from the young: it was their politics and their sexuality that the generations above them were forced to flatter or fight, exploit or succumb to ...”

“... stories. Fitzgerald later wrote a biography, The Knox Brothers, a title which she reminded Malcolm Muggeridge he had advised against on the grounds that ‘it would sound like a circus.’ It was her second book. The first, a life of Burne-Jones, appeared two years earlier, in 1975, when she was nearly 60. Until then child-rearing, teaching, a ...”

“... vibrates between the perilous and the preposterous. She comes on as a campus novelist, the Malcolm Bradbury of the bush. Jessica Miles, academic daughter of what sounds like a Scottish Baptist family, brings the gospel of media studies to the emergent middle class at Zunia’s university, and has to fight for her own typewriter, just as though she ...”

“... would be lying if he didn’t tell you it was merely ‘roomy’. Top marks go to Pritchett and to Malcolm Bradbury, who wins a hard-to-come-by ‘elegant’ for his Victorian house, with bonus marks for having made Haffenden approach it by way of an impressive ‘gravel drive’. As to the places Haffenden would least like to move into, these are ...”

“... and into the ‘bloodthirsty’ Balkans. Later, John Buchan, Lawrence Durrell, Evelyn Waugh and Malcolm Bradbury were among those who tried their hand at brutal, gaudy Balkan Ruritanias. Literary ‘othering’, as teachers tell their classes, is a way of confirming your own society as ‘normal’ by heightening the aberrant weirdness of its supposed ...”