Jim Dixon has accidentally fallen into a job at one of Britain's new red-brick universities. A moderately successful future in the History Department beckons. As long as Jim can survive a madrigal-singing weekend at Professor Welch's, deliver a lecture on 'Merrie England' and resist Christine, the hopelessly desirable girlfriend of Welch's awful son Bertrand.

‘A classic comic novel, a seminal campus novel, and a novel which seized and expressed the mood of those who came of age in the 1950s. But there is more to it than that . . . Its university setting functions primarily as the epitome of a stuffy, provincial bourgeois world into which the hero is promoted by education, and against whose values and codes he rebels, at first inwardly and at last outwardly’ – David Lodge

‘Dixon makes little dents in the smug fabric of hypocritical, humbugging, classbound British society . . . Amis caught the mood of post-war restiveness in a book which, though socially significant, was, and still is, extremely funny’ – Anthony Burgess