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The History Man

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The History Man

By: Malcolm Bradbury
Narrated by: Nicholas Boulton
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About this listen

The very liberal Kirks are throwing a party. For Howard Kirk, liberal sociology lecturer whose deluded sense of heroism has him moving seductively around the university campus, the net must be perfectly cast: ‘if you want to have something that’s genuinely unstructured, you have to plan it carefully.’ Kirk embodies the contradictions of the era’s intellectual and political climate. As he navigates complex relationships with his wife, his students and his colleagues, he pursues personal and professional agendas under the guise of progressive thought.

Malcolm Bradbury’s disconcerting, provocative and savagely funny satire of academic life lit up the 1970s; intolerance, self-interest, marital fragility, tensions surrounding gender, sex and promiscuity, politics, power and radicalism… It was a book for then and it is one for now.

‘Exhilarating… A book which captures for all time the spirit of an age’ – Margaret Drabble

‘Extremely witty… Bradbury writes brilliantly’ – The New York Times

©1975 Malcolm Bradbury (P)2025 Naxos AudioBooks UK Ltd. Classics Dark Humour Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction Satire Funny Witty Student
All stars
Most relevant
Personally, I Could not help but picture Russell Brand as the sleazy and disingenuous Howard Kirk. But there’s plenty of other namesakes at large. Interesting too that he got his opponent ‘cancelled.’ Aspects of culture that seem contemporary have been with us for longer than we care to recognise, and this book and its cast of characters are all still relevant and recognisable today

We all know a Howard Kirk

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Cruelly funny but in the end sympathetic portrait of a fashionable academic, author and TV personality.

Brilliantly skewers 1960 sociology

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I find Bradbury a crashing bore of a man. The little pulpit piece foisted on us at the end of the audio does nothing to dispel this impression. All in all, heavy handed and clunky as you might expect from Bradbury.

Entertaining and annoying

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