It must be … self-admiration that leads Malcolm Bradbury to fill a third of Who Do You Think You Are? with poor and loutish parodies of other writers, many of whom are a good deal better than himself. Mr Bradbury is of the opinion that random exaggeration and distortion, plus vulgarity, are a substitute for really understanding the forces which generate a writer's idiosyncracies; this opinion is false.

Having finished with the parodies, a reader may turn back to the stories to see just what it is that Mr Bradbury so much prefers to Murdoch, Durrell, Spark and company. To complicate matters, Mr Bradbury's own stories are really rather good, and often extremely funny. In 'A Goodbye for Evadne Winterbottom', for example, he cunningly exploits the central character's 'liberal', trimming evasiveness, giving him a prolix dexterity that makes his voice a marvellous narrative instrument, while at the same time...