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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
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
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Reviews
"Voicing multiple characters with little apparent effort, Golden Voice Nicholas Boulton keeps the listener engaged with this comedy of manners and mores in academia in 1972. The setting is a college in southeast England, where Professor Howard Kirk has come to teach sociology and, we learn, engage in intellectual jousting with colleagues while seducing his students. Throwing around Marxist jargon, working his own cushy schedule, and carrying on affairs and intrigues while his wife tends to home and family, Kirk is living the good life--and getting away with it. A contemporary audience may be amused, at first, but there are moments when the similarities between yesterday's smug intellectuals and today's self-referential denizens of the ivory tower make this novel seem both prescient and depressingly familiar. L.W.S. � AudioFile 2025, Portland, Maine"
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