For me, the one beacon of light in a thoroughly miserable MA was Malcolm Bradbury. I looked forward to his seminars, with him puffing away on his pipe, being funny, and taking a proper interest in his students. With the Creative Writing masters program he co-founded, he was the star of the Literature department. The writer of what became one of the defining novels of the 1970s, The History Man, he was often on television and added a little stardust to the University of East Anglia, a new university up in the wilds of Norfolk. Or, as others called it, the arse-end of nowhere.

Like many young people in the early 1980s, I chose uea precisely because it was modern and a bit experimental. Who wanted stuffy old Oxford when you could have the concrete mini-metropolis of a university birthed in ideals of being contemporary, modern, and comfortably radical?

It’s now twenty years since Bradbury died and time to wonder where we are with his troublesome, troubling, and sometimes brilliant novel—and whether it has finally run out of steam. Reading it again, I’m struck that it depicts a world so unfamiliar, so odd, that it’s hard to believe that it was ever like that.

The History Manfeatures a bunch of thoroughly dislikeable and unsympathetic characters, none more so than Howard Kirk, the self-styled “theoretician of sociability,” radical sociology lecturer, and proto–television personality. Kirk spouts revolution but acts entirely in his own interests, fomenting trouble,