Ever since Dixon’s pie-eyed lecture on Merrie England in Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim there’s been a hunger for more exposures of the pretentious absurdities and backbiting jealousies of academia. Here’s another from a distinguished professor of English at London University who’s presumably seen a great deal of it. Perhaps it’s because of this that David Nokes’s book is much closer to farce than to the reality you find, say, in C. P. Snow’s novels set in a Cambridge college or Malcolm Bradbury’s satires on life at the redbrick and new plate-glass universities. In these books people must have seen glimpses of themselves or at least recognised others, but I can’t imagine anyone seeing either themselves or anyone they know in The Nightingale Papers.
To Danny the academic business is a bluff and a game. Standing in for a colleague, he delivers a lecture on The Rake’s Progress but finding he’s got the slides in the reverse order explains he did so deliberately because ‘it demystified the iconic status of the images’.
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