THE HISTORY MAN

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 [Published: OCTOBER 2025]