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“... Malcolm Bradbury has what the political image-makers call ‘high definition’. We know who he is, where he’s coming from, what he stands for. As a novelist he belongs to a recognisable literary stable: specifically the ‘university novel’, more generally the humorist-humanist vein of embattled liberalism in post-war British fiction ...”

“... the titles sound important, the back pages are crammed with appendices, footnotes, bibliographies. Malcolm Bradbury includes a ‘Select Bibliography’ and a ‘List of Major Works’. Frederick Karl offers up columns of elaborate notes. Marshall Walker supplies a ‘chronological table’ that correlates authors and titles with events (Alexander Graham ...”

“... know-how – and a lot of computer-generated money. Representing the constituency of the users, Malcolm Bradbury, gracefully grateful on behalf of the writing profession for so writer-friendly a dictionary, offered some innocent jests about bazooms – the last word actually defined in Volume One (A-Bazouki), though, as various persons complained from ...”

“... to decade. Questions of aesthetic value are routinely bypassed. Of the two critics under review, Malcolm Bradbury is a self-conscious progressive, but he writes the old kind of history. D.J. Taylor is a self-conscious reactionary whose book is a rather strange example of the new kind. Taylor’s belief, set out bluntly in his introduction, is that no ...”

“... read The History Men by John Kenyon. I remember reading a different book, The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury, some years ago. I did not find Bradbury’s book at all funny, which I am told it is intended to be. After a careful reading I had not the slightest inkling of what the book was supposed to be ...”

“... work (Setting the World on Fire) the narrative hinges on the crucial Suez-Hungary year, 1956-57. Malcolm Bradbury – though he as yet has written no novel on the theme – has expounded at length his agreement that 1956 is the year in which Trillingesque liberal humanism went under to the new barbarism. A.S. Byatt (The Virgin in the Garden) found a ...”

“... and earlier writing, until there is little left that doesn’t speak, somehow, of self-renewal. Bradbury and Ruland maintain that American literature always has been and always will be ‘pre-eminently a modern literature’. Their history surveys the long march of self-renewals with the benevolent discrimination of a spectator at the Rose Bowl parade. Each ...”

“... Denis Diderot, the hero of Malcolm Bradbury’s new novel, has one niche in the English language with ‘esprit de l’escalier’, his only entry in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations: ‘An untranslatable phrase, the meaning of which is that one only thinks on one’s way downstairs of the smart retort one might have made in the drawing room ...”

“... seduction of words far more than the need to communicate with any particular human being.’ In Malcolm Bradbury’s Rates of Exchange, stories are a currency like any other, paper fictions: but for Bradbury’s novelist Katya Princip they are also a way of learning ‘a certain sense of existence’. Even after ...”

“... Henri Mensonge, scheduled to speak on the totally deconstructed self, fails to arrive: Bradbury loves a donnish joke. It all winds up with a postscript set in Norwich. At a staid University Teachers of English get-together George Steiner, Frank Kermode and Seamus Heaney do their party pieces and a novelist – the author of Doctor Criminale, we ...”

“... of Gerald’s Party, Coover’s latest novel, comes larded with tributes from Angela Carter and Malcolm Bradbury, both of whom insist on its canonical status. Coover is ‘a master’, says Carter, and according to Bradbury he is ‘one of the great innovative writers of the United States’. At least Coover has been ...”

“... interview-subject for Imre Salusinszky. Unfortunately or otherwise, he is only a figment of Malcolm Bradbury’s imagination: the legendarily invisible and absent author of La Fornication comme Acte Culturel, a Deconstructionist account of sex which includes within it ‘the Deconstruction of Deconstruction itself’. Mensonge is one beyond the ...”

“... are present at the occasion and taking notes on it) but which bears the impress especially of Malcolm Bradbury’s Eating people is wrong (1959). Malcolm had come to the English Department at Birmingham in 1961, a year after me, and we quickly became friends and collaborators. In 1963 the two of us and a talented ...”

“... who run this very contemporary show: Miles Kington and Russell Davies, Alan Coren and Clive James, Malcolm Bradbury and George Melly. The parodied A’s have it: Douglas Adams (hitchhiking through a galaxy of fading stars), Woody Allen, Kingsley Amis, Anon, John Aubrey, Auden and Ayckbourn. An Auden parody is called ‘Self-Congratulatory Ode ...’, but ...”

“... his several extended visits to the United States; about his close friendship and rivalry with Malcolm Bradbury; about the onset of deafness in late middle age; and about much, much more besides. Lodge said in a recent interview that the idea of his writing an autobiography had been suggested by a reader of Lives in Writing, given the collection’s ...”