THE HISTORY MAN

Husband and wife radical poseurs wreak havoc in British academia during the '60s and '70s in this satirical novel first published in 1975. Novelist, critic, television dramatist and part-time professor Bradbury won the Royal Society of Literature's Heinemann Prize for it and adapted it into a TV series. On audiotape, narrator Paul Shelley gives it fine treatment, underplaying the humor and nicely vivifying the characters. Despite all the references to the European left, anyone trafficking among the American liberal intelligentsia of the period will recognize the symptoms and get a chuckle out of them. Y.R. © AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine [Published: AUG/SEP 00]