The British Museum is Falling Down is a brilliant comic satire of academia, religion and human entanglements. First published in 1965, it tells the story of hapless, scooter-riding young research student Adam Appleby, who is trying to write his thesis but is constantly distracted - not least by the fact that, as Catholics in the 1960s, he and his wife must rely on 'Vatican roulette' to avoid a fourth child.
The British Museum is Falling Down is a brilliant comic satire of academia, religion and human entanglements. Published in 1965, it tells the story of hapless, scooter-riding young research student Adam Appleby, who is trying to write his thesis but is constantly distracted - not least by the fact that, as Catholics in the 1960s, he and his wife must rely on 'Vatican roulette' to avoid a fourth child. 'A comic tour de force...the hapless Appleby remains one of his most keenly observed characters' Observer
A graduate student in literature and a practicing Catholic, Adam Appleby is also married and has three children. On this foggy day in London, work and life conspire to propel Adam through a series of disasters which will leave readers laughing out loud. --Amazon.
The ups, downs, and exploits of a group of British Catholics--for whom the sexual revolution came a little later than it did for everybody else... In this bracing satire, a group of university students make their way through the fifties and into the turbulent sixties and seventies. We first meet Dennis, Michael, Ruth, Polly, and the others at the altar rail of Our Lady and St. Jude, but soon enough they get caught up in the alternately hilarious and poignant preoccupations of work, marriage, sex, and babies--not always in that order. A satirical comedy in the tradition of Evelyn Waugh, Souls and Bodies take an unblinking look at the sexual revolution and the contemporaneous upheavals in the Catholic Church. The result is as unsettlingly true as it is funny.
"Polly, Dennis, Angela, Adrian and the rest are bound to lose their spiritual innocence as well as their virginities on the journey between university in the 1950s and the marriages, families, careers and deaths that follow. On the one hand there's Sex and then the Pill, on the other there is the traditional Catholic Church. In this razor-sharp novel, David Lodge exposes the pressures that assailed Catholics everywhere within a more permissive society, and voices their eternal question: how far can you go?" -- Provided by publisher.
Winner of the Leo Gershoy Award Winner of the Louis Gottschalk Prize A Times Book of the Week When the British Museum opened its doors in 1759, it was the first free national public museum in the world. Collecting the World tells the story of the eccentric collector whose thirst for universal knowledge brought it into being. A man of insatiable curiosity and wide-ranging interests, Hans Sloane assembled a collection of antiquities, oddities, and artifacts from around the British Empire to form the most famous cabinet of curiosities of its time. With few curbs on his passion, he established a network of agents to supply him with objects from China, India, the Caribbean, and beyond. Wampum beads, rare manuscripts, a shoe made of human skin: nothing was off limits. The first biography of Sloane based on his complete writings, Collecting the World portrays one of the Enlightenment's most original luminaries. "A magnificent scholarly coup and an enthralling read... It conveys the excitement of original research as well as the thrill of tracking exotic curiosities to their source." --Sunday Times "Delbourgo's engrossing new biography situates Sloane within the welter of intellectual and political crosscurrents that marked his times." --New York Times Book Review "A superb biography--humane, judicious and as passionately curious as Sloane himself." --Times Literary Supplement "A superb book, enjoyably written, beautifully illustrated, and based on deep knowledge of the sources." --The Telegraph
When Philip Swallow and Professor Morris Zapp participate in their universities' Anglo-American exchange scheme, the Fates play a hand, and each academic finds himself enmeshed in the life of his counterpart on the opposite side of the Atlantic. Nobody is immune to the exchange: students, colleagues, even wives are swapped as events spiral out of control. And soon both sundrenched Euphoric State university and rain-kissed university of Rummidge are a hotbed of intrigue, lawlessness and broken vows...
