The History Man, Malcolm Bradbury’s satire of early 1970s campus life, came out half a century ago this autumn. In tribute, his publishers, together with the National Literacy and Malcolm Bradbury Trusts, are hosting a commemorative event at which alumni of the University of East Anglia’s Creative Writing MA – the keystone in Bradbury’s memorial arch – will read selected passages. It sounds just the kind of thing Bradbury would have enjoyed sending up, and no doubt his ghost will be shuffling quietly around the perimeter taking notes.

Bradbury (1932–2000) published six novels in a literary career that went right back to the Harold Macmillan-era Eating People is Wrong (1959). All of them are variations on his chief preoccupation as a writer – the difficulty of being a liberal in an increasingly illiberal world – and each of them is set in or on the margins of a university. If Howard Kirk, The History Man’s unscrupulous, student-seducing sociology lecturer, is the nastiest of his characters, then there are plenty of other people stealthily at large in Bradbury’s books – and sometimes not so stealthily – with the aim of constraining individual freedoms in the name of ‘equality’ and ‘justice’.

Naturally, there had been campus, or rather ‘university’, novels long before Bradbury. The tradition goes all the way back to Cuthbert Bede’s The Adventures of Mr Verdant Green (1853) and Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown at Oxford (1861), and there are some fascinating glimpses of pre-Victorian Cambridge in the early chapters