Melvyn Bragg, whose reputation as a novelist was established in the 1960s, has published eleven novels. In the 1970s his career as a Television Arts presenter also bloomed, and he has become a small-scale celebrity. The two careers have interacted oddly and not always fortunately.

Though he feels his writing cannot be easily categorized, Bragg is in some ways typical of a new grouping in the history of the English novel. After World War II this group comprised ambitious, provincial, lower-middle-or upper-working-class men (there were no women), often from the North, who benefited from the 1944 Butler Education Act which made provision for a grant system in higher education. This grouping, prefigured a generation earlier by C. P. Snow, included writers as diverse from one another as Alan Sillitoe, David Storey, Stan Barstow, Kingsley Amis, John Wain, John Braine, and Malcolm Bradbury. They championed the renascence of a provincial...