Malcolm Bradbury has been one of the central figures in British literature since 1960. As a critic, editor, commentator, entrepreneur, anthologist, and judge for fiction awards he has tirelessly promoted the vitality and importance of contemporary...

Malcolm Bradbury is part of a new breed of British academic who is as seriously involved in novel writing as he is in literary criticism and theory. His university teaching seems to reinforce his writing (both fictional and critical) at every turn; he...

THE NOVELIST, critic and television scriptwriter Malcolm Bradbury spent almost 50 years in universities at home and abroad. In the course of his career as Professor of American Studies at the University of East Anglia from 1970 until 1994, he was a visiting academic...

THE death last November of the academic and author Malcolm Bradbury from a rare form of pneumonia has robbed British Literature of a generous and expansive voice which had much to say over the last forty years. Bradbury rose to the top of...

Stepping Westward is a great advance over Malcolm Bradbury's first novel, Eating People Is Wrong; in fact, it shows a really significant comic talent. (p. 53) But I don't want primarily to appraise [Stepping Westward] here. I want to reflect on some of its themes, both as Bradbury handles them, and as they exist (in the reader's mind) outside his handling of them. Just what makes him a significant comic talent, of course, is that he puts his finger on material in the reader's min...

It may well be … that the period of bitterly opposed [literary] factions is already over, that novelists are starting to put sides to middle, borrowing elements of naturalism, modernism, symbolism and even criticism with cheerful insouciance. In his new book of essays [Possibilities], Malcolm Bradbury—himself both novelist and critic—suggests as much. True, he is not an impartial witness; he seems to hold much the same attitude towards the nouveau roman as Professor Weightman, calling i...

Hail the bumbling, fumbling conquering hero. Malcolm Bradbury has written a first novel [Eating People Is Wrong] that is sloppy, structurally flabby, occasionally inane, frequently magnificent and ultimately successful. It is as if Dickens and Evelyn Waugh sat down together and said, "Let's write a comic novel in the manner of Kingsley Amis about a man in search of his lost innocence who finds it." The result is one of the most substantial and dazzling literary feasts this year. Bradbur...