The unbridled greed, pettiness, buffoonery and intellectual gobbledygook in the world of higher scholarship are the topics of this thorough and thoroughly funny roman a' English department. It's interesting for a couple of reasons, aside from its humor and spoofiness: it's an insider's view of things -- always the …
When Phillip Swallow and Professor Morris Zapp participate in their universities' Anglo-American exchange scheme, the Fates play a hand, and each academic finds himself enmeshed in the life of his counterpart on the opposite side of the Atlantic. Nobody is immune to the exchange: students, colleagues, even wives are …
Winner of the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award and short-listed for the Booker Prize, "Nice Work" is a hilarious comedy of society and class misunderstandings. When Vic Wilcox, MD of Pringle's engineering works, meets English lecturer Dr Robyn Penrose, sparks fly as their lifestyles and ideologies collide head …
Ralph Messenger is an international academic star in the highly trendy field of language and thought research. Novelist Helen Reed arrives at the university to teach creative writing and to recover from the unexpected death of her husband. Despite huge differences in belief and temperament, they begin a secret affair …
Retired Professor of Linguistics Desmond Bates is going deaf. It's a bother for his wife who has an enviably successful new career and is too busy to be endlessly repeating herself. Roles are reversed with his aging father, who resents his son's attempts to help him. And then there's Alex, a student whom Desmond has …
Therapy is a novel by British author David Lodge. The story concerns a successful sitcom writer, Laurence Passmore, plagued by middle-age neuroses and a failed marriage. His only problem seems to be an "internal derangement of the knee" but a mid-life crisis has struck and he is discovering angst. His familiar doses …
Paradise, tourist style. It's a very long way from home. Bernard Walsh is in Hawaii on family business, escorting his querulous father to the bedside of a long-forgotten aunt. His mission transports him from quiet obscurity in Rummridge, England, to a lush tropical playground, from cloistered solitude into the …
The Rhythm Method is the curse of young Adam Appleby's life and the cause of his children's. While Adam gestates his thesis in the British Museum, his wife worries at home because her period is late and a fourth little bundle of (expensive) joy seems to be on the way, thanks to 'Vatican Roulette'. Though Adam's …
The Art of Fiction is a book of literary criticism by the British novelist David Lodge. The chapters of the book first appeared in 1991-1992 as weekly columns in The Independent on Sunday and were eventually gathered into book form and published in 1992. The essays as they appear in the book have in many cases been …