Malcolm Bradbury's greatest and most influential novel was The History Man. His death on November 27th at the age of 68 marks the close of half-a-century of academic and literary history, of which he was par excellence the chronicler.
Malcolm Bradbury was born in Sheffield, the son of Arthur Bradbury, a railway worker, and his wife Doris, and grew up in Nottingham, where he attended West Bridgford Grammar School. He took a first-class degree in English at the University of Leicester, and did postgraduate work at Queen Mary College, London, at Manchester and in the US, before taking up his first full-time appointment, in 1959, in the adult education department at Hull University.
In 1961, he moved to the English department of Birmingham University. In 1965, he joined the new University of East Anglia, and five years later became professor of American studies; he was to remain in Norwich for the rest of his life.
Malcolm Bradbury was a prolific writer - as an academic critic, as a novelist and humorist, and for television, a medium which increasingly fascinated him. His many critical works include The Modern American Novel (1983), No, Not Bloomsbury and The Modern World: Ten Great Writers (both 1987), From Puritanism To Postmodernism: A History Of American Literature (with Richard Ruland, 1991) and Dangerous Pilgrimages (1995).
He also edited The Penguin Book Of Modern British Short Stories (1987) and The Atlas of Literature (1996), to which he was also a major contributor over an astonishingly wide range of topics. His original television dramas included the two four-part series, The Gravy Train (1990) and The Gravy Train Goes East (1991), both sharp and uncomfortably accurate satires on the politics of the European Community, as well as Cuts (1996), which contrasted the visible consumption of television companies with the starvation of universities in an age of sado-monetarism.
Apart from his original scripts, he adapted a wide range of books for television, ranging from Tom Sharpe's Porterhouse Blue and Kingsley Amis's The Green Man to Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm and the Dalziel and Pascoe novels of Reginald Hill.
It is a matter of regret that his adaptation of William Cooper's Tales From Provincial Life, a novel with which he had particularly close affinities, has not yet reached the television screen.
Malcolm Bradbury made no secret of the fact that fiction, and in particular the novel, was his true love. "Like most comic novelists, I take the novel extremely seriously," he said. "It is the best of all forms - open and personal, intelligent and inquiring. I value it for its scepticism, its irony and its play."
His first novel, Eating People Is Wrong, appeared in 1959 and was an instant success. From then on, his novels appeared at the rate of roughly one a decade, with Stepping Westward (1965), The History Man (1975), Rates Of Exchange (1982), Dr Criminale (1992) and To the Hermitage (2000), based on Diderot's visit to the court of Catherine the Great, a brilliant departure from the form which he had made so much his own.
In almost all of his novels, the most frequently recurring theme is that of the slightly naive, liberal innocent, usually an academic, hilariously abroad in an unfamiliar, and occasionally slightly threatening, context.
Of all his novels, however, it is The History Man by which he will be most lastingly remembered, and which indeed was one of the outstanding novels of its decade. It charts the successful career of the manipulative and promiscuous radical sociologist, Howard Kirk, at the new University of Watermouth (which bears more than a passing resemblance to East Anglia), and satirises savagely his substitution of "trends for morals and commitments".
Kirk moves through the university like a Marxist Iago, wrecking careers, corrupting innocence and generally subverting stability in the name of history. "I know how your aggression operates," one of his more perceptive colleagues tells him. "If you wanted someone through a window, you wouldn't push him yourself. You'd get someone else to do it. Or persuade the man he should do it himself, in his own best interests."
All Malcolm Bradbury's novels, for all their surface wit and comedy, have serious moral and philosophical subtexts; in The History Man the wit is darker, the satire more biting, the atmosphere more menacing and the conclusion more hopeless.
Malcolm Bradbury will be remembered for his part, with Angus Wilson, in founding in 1970 - and, for many years, teaching - the creative writing programme at East Anglia. His generosity to all literary ventures he regarded as worthy was remarkable, and his inability to reject appeals for help was a severe trial to his agent. The list of organisations to which he was prepared to give precious time was impressive, and included the Booker Prize management committee.
To few, however, did Malcolm Bradbury give as much time and attention as he did to the affairs of the British Council.
His tours overseas for it, many of which reappeared transmogrified in his novels, were invariably marked by unscheduled revelry, as well as by serious literary discussions. And when the council's literature department decided to produce an annual anthology of the most recent British writing it could use to publicise new young writers abroad, it was natural for it to look first to Malcolm Bradbury for help and encouragement, and as an editor of the first two volumes of New Writing (1992 and 1993).
Malcolm Bradbury married Elizabeth Salt in 1959 and they had two sons. He was appointed CBE in 1991 for services to literature and was knighted this year.
Sir Malcolm Stanley Bradbury: born 1932; died, November 2000