David Lodge

David Lodge is a professor of English at the University of Birmingham and the author of several novels. He visited Poland in November last year, on the eve of the military take-over. The record of his visit has not been revised in the light of what happened later. He sees it as having acquired since then some unintended ironies, and, for himself, considerable poignancy. Publishing it now is meant as ‘a small gesture of sympathy and concern’.

Letter

Faculty at War

17 June 1982

SIR: Reviewing Re-Reading English, Tom Paulin describes its contributors as ‘frustrated sociologists who believe that sonnets and beer mats ought to be treated on an equal footing and examined as interesting “cultural artefacts" (this stupidly philistine term is favoured by David Lodge and other members of the new critical generation).’ ‘Cultural artefacts’ seems to me a descriptive term...
Letter

Faculty at War

4 March 1982

SIR: Reviewing Re-Reading English, Tom Paulin describes its contributors as ‘frustrated sociologists who believe that sonnets and beer mats ought to be treated on an equal footing and examined as interesting “cultural artefacts" (this stupidly philistine term is favoured by David Lodge and other members of the new critical generation).’ ‘Cultural artefacts’ seems to me a descriptive term...
Letter

A Polish Notebook

4 February 1982

David Lodge writes: I would not wish to exonerate the Church in Poland from some responsibility for the tradition of anti-semitism in that country, but there is plenty of evidence that recent manifestations of anti-semitism – in 1968, and during the period of Solidarity’s success – were deliberately generated from within the Party for political purposes (see, for example, Neal Ascherson’s The...

The LOT plane is late leaving Heathrow because of baggage-loading problems. ‘You will understand,’ says the ground hostess, apologising for the delay, ‘that we are carrying a great deal of baggage to Poland these days.’ The passengers waiting at Gate 11 smile wryly at each other. Their hand luggage is bursting with goods difficult or impossible to obtain in Poland these days. The British Council has thoughtfully supplied us (British scholars bound for a conference on English literature organised by the University of Warsaw) with a list: soap, shampoo, washing powder, chocolate, sweets, batteries, notepaper, toilet paper, coffee, sugar … Most of us will spend the next few days trying to find ways of slipping these goodies to our Polish hosts without giving offence.

Letter

Not cricket

4 June 1981

SIR: Alan Hurst (Letters, 20 August) thinks it isn’t quite cricket to publish critical commentary upon one’s own novels. Perhaps he missed, or misread, your editorial note which explained that the article to which he objects, ‘A Catholic Novel’ (LRB, 4 June), was written as an introduction to a reissue, by Secker in July of this year, of my novel The British Museum is falling down, first published...

Whisky out of Teacups: David Lodge

Stefan Collini, 19 February 2015

In​ the preface to The Ambassadors written for the New York Edition of 1909, Henry James insisted that although the conception of the novel required that the unfolding action be in some sense...

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Big Head, Many Brains: H.G. Wells

Colin Burrow, 16 June 2011

In 1892, while H.G. Wells was transforming himself from a draper’s assistant to a student of science, he married his cousin Isabel. He ungallantly described her in his Experiment in...

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Decrepit Lit: David Lodge

Lorna Scott Fox, 8 May 2008

Thirty years ago, the campus novels of David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury mythologised a setting that expressed, better than any other, the cultural and ideological chaos of the 1960s and 1970s....

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Living as Little as Possible: Lodge’s James

Terry Eagleton, 23 September 2004

Since the Modernist revolution, writing has been seen as an intensely private activity, a view which might have come as something of a surprise to Chaucer or Pope. For liberals such as Henry...

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Rainbows

Graham Coster, 12 September 1991

Had the Pentagon, back in the late Sixties, accepted Boeing’s tender for a massive new cargo aircraft for the United States Air Force, David Lodge would not have been able to write Paradise...

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Let’s get the hell out of here

Patrick Parrinder, 29 September 1988

Here, in these three novels, are three representations of the state of the art. In The Satanic Verses the narrator, who may or may not be the Devil, confides that ‘what follows is tragedy....

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Shakers

Denis Donoghue, 6 November 1986

This is a gathering of David Lodge’s easy pieces: they are footnotes, shouldernotes and headnotes to the formal work in fiction and literary criticism he has published in the past twenty...

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Jogging in the woods at Bellagio

Frank Kermode, 19 April 1984

Small World is in the author’s words ‘a kind of sequel’ to Changing Places, published nine years ago. The place-changers, Zapp and Swallow, are again central characters; the...

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Structuralism Domesticated

Frank Kermode, 20 August 1981

This is a collection of essays by one of our best literary critics, in fact exactly the kind of thing one would expect from him; it simply continues the good work in the manner of his last two...

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A week or two ago I reviewed a novel about rock-climbers. A very absorbing tale it was too, but specialised; and one was bound to say that to a reader wholly without interest in the technicalities...

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