MALCOLM BRADBURY - Who Do You Think You Are

London England, Secker & Warburg, 1976. First Edition, Binding: Boards, Fine/Very Good. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall 0436065037 Hardback Malcolm Bradbury's new book contains seven short stories and eight parodies. Of the former the favourite of many readers may well be the title story with its superb send-up of a television cultural programme and what happens after. But there are many other delights - the elderly female lecturer who seeks to bequeath a bottle of George Bernard Shaw's semen to a mid-West university, or the young American couple who give a dinner for a visiting English professor and his wife. All of them are told with that distanced irony that made The History Man the most talked of novel of 1975. The parodies from Dodos Among The Elephants (Angus Wilson) to the Egyptian setting of Voluptia (Laurene Durrell) are brilliantly perceptive of the quirks of their subjects, to whom, one guesses,they will give as much amusement as to their readers.