Easier said than done, perhaps. In his book-length essay Changing my Mind, published last year, the éminence grise of the British novel Julian Barnes (and erstwhile friend of both Amis and Hitchens) recounted how he had once looked down on the elder E.M. Forster for the “feeble” arguments of his Aspects of the Novel. Forster’s masterly short novel A Room With a View (1908) was, to Barnes, “a fusty, musty, dusty read, with rather antique prose”. But even worse was the fact that “Forster had stopped writing fiction at forty-five, then lived on for another forty-six years, in the process becoming a grander and grander (if still modest) old man”. But while the younger Barnes had been “less forgiving” about Forster’s literary retirement, he later came to realize that there was something honorable about packing it in: “Nowadays, I would admire a writer who falls silent because he or she has nothing more to say.” 

Now, less than a year later, Barnes himself has called it a day. In his new novel, Departure(s), the narrator (also named Julian Barnes) declares: “This will be my last book.” Written with the wry intelligence and quiet irony we have come to associate with Barnes’s work, Departure(s) also displays the formal hybridity of his earlier not-quite-novels, like Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) or A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989). The fictional Barnes broadly corresponds with the factual one: he is a widower in his late seventies, his debut novel was called Metroland, his partner is named Rachel (Barnes married former publisher Rachel Cugnoni at a small ceremony in August last year) and he has just been diagnosed with myeloproliferative neoplasm, a “manageable” form of bone-marrow cancer. But this sounds worse than it is: “my life is not seriously compromised,” the fictional Barnes reassures us. “Unless, of course, I get bum cancer etc etc as well.”

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You can tell from the phrase “bum cancer” that the fictional Barnes is hardly po-faced about his diagnosis. He keeps a contemporaneous diary throughout his time in hospital, which displays the kind of avuncular comedy we have come to associate with all of Barnes’s work (one never laughs at Barnes; at best he might persuade you to nod with a wry smile). When an A&E doctor says they “can’t say if it is or isn’t leukemia”, the narrator supposes this “sounds slightly cavalier”; when the phlebotomists draw yet more blood, he refers to it as “pints of Barnes’s Best”. But there is plenty that gets on his nerves: not just the NHS jargon (one poor soul is told that she’s on the “palliative pathway”), but also the broader “attitudes” towards cancer that “make no difference” to one’s outcome: “‘Being brave,’ or being shit-scared, or occupying a midpoint of stubborn self-deception, doesn’t alter anything.” Hitchens made a similar point in Mortality, the posthumous collection of Vanity Fair pieces about his own esophageal cancer, published in 2012: “People don’t have cancer: They are reported to be battling cancer. No well-wisher omits the combative image: You can beat this.” It’s hard to imagine Hitchens using the voguish language of “pathways”; he preferred a pithy one-liner, like “the thing about Stage Four is that there is no such thing as Stage Five”.

The cancer diagnosis leads the fictional Barnes to ruminate on death, memory, time, love and literature: all his usual themes. Indeed the claim that Departure(s) will be his “last book” is undermined by the fact that it is also all of his previous ones. Much of the material on death and memory is practically lifted from Changing My Mind, as well as the Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending (2011) and his sardonically titled memoir on mortality, Nothing to Be Frightened Of (2008). In this latest novel, whole lines are lifted or rehashed from the earlier work. The sub-plot about Stephen and Jean, two of the narrator’s university friends who attempt to rekindle their student love at retirement age, seems original enough until Barnes reheats the line “Once bitten, twice bitten” from The Sense of an Ending and 2018’s The Only Story. Is this repetitiousness a sign of fading powers? Perhaps. But as the fictional Barnes says to a friend who chides him for all the “hybrid stuff” in his writing: “I don’t mind you not liking my books, but you are mistaken if you think I don’t know exactly what I’m up to when I write them.” 

The habit of thinking and writing about death has left Barnes admirably stoical: “it is now my generation’s turn to die off,” he states matter-of-factly. That generation included Amis and Hitchens as well as Clive James, who died in 2019, and Barnes’s late first wife, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh, who died in 2008. They met in the early Seventies at The New Statesman: Hitchens worked there as a staff writer, Amis was literary editor, and Barnes his deputy. When he wasn’t on television, James contributed book reviews. From the mid-Seventies to the early Eighties, the four of them met weekly in Soho for the now-legendary “Friday lunch”. 

As Hitchens wrote in his memoir, Hitch-22 (2010), the Friday lunch was never planned, but “began to simply ‘occur’ … as a sort of end-of-the-week clearing house for gossip and jokes”. Other attendees included the up-and-coming novelist Ian McEwan, the poet James Fenton, the Observer literary editor Terry Kilmartin, the critic Russell Davies, and the elder statesmen Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest (known affectionately as “Kingers” and “Conkers”). Much was made of this at the time, as Hitchens recounted: “we were believed to ‘control’ a lot of the reviewing space in London, and much envious and paranoid comment was made then, and has been made since, to the effect that we vindicated or confirmed F.R. Leavis’s nightmare of a conspiratorial London literary establishment.” Taking a line from Flaubert, who wrote after the deaths of his friends Louis Bouilhet and Sainte-Beuve that his “little band is diminishing”, Barnes writes in Departure(s): “the ‘little band’ to which I belonged when I came to literary London half a century ago has been thinned over the decades” and is “now beginning to die out”. 

There is in this more than one ending: not just the death of each individual writer in turn, but the end of a whole era. Barnes, Amis and Hitchens were part of a new cohort of writers who brought British fiction and criticism out from the tearooms of the Fifties and Sixties and onto the world stage. No generation of novelists and essayists before or since has managed to combine aesthetic and intellectual ambition with outright commercial success in such a way — even the legends of modernism like Joyce and Woolf endured periods of relative obscurity. The vitality and interest of this new cohort’s work was made clear enough in spring 1983, when the literary magazine Granta published a special issue on the “Best of Young British Novelists”, with new fiction from 20 writers, including Amis, Barnes, McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Salman Rushdie. An accompanying group portrait was taken by Lord Snowdon and published in the Sunday Times Magazine. The photograph is striking: Adam Mars-Jones looking annoyed, Graham Swift impatient to leave, Amis in his school shirt, McEwan dressed like he has already reached retirement age. 

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As well as their obvious talent and ingenuity, the emergence of the Granta generation was due, in part, to chance: the rapid expansion of the news media throughout the Seventies and Eighties left plenty of space for commissioning young writers and reviewing their newest releases; the growth (in size and esteem) of British universities in general and English departments in particular established a climate of taste for intelligent fiction and criticism; and, fueling both, the 1944 Butler Education Act made state secondary schools free and increased the number of grammar school places. History was on their side: as the former Sunday Times journalist John Walsh describes in his memoir, Circus of Dreams, these were “the baby-boomer generation”, who came of age “in the wild Sixties and felt empowered to do something more creative than join the professions or the financial world”.

Walsh calls this generation “the 1980s literary renaissance” and that phrase is more accurate than you might think. Just as the daubers of Florence in the 14th century were supported and encouraged by the patronage of the Church and wealthy families like the Medici, the literary baby boomers began their careers when Britain’s cultural institutions had clout, energy and money. Newspapers had cash, universities had cash, the Arts Council had cash, so writers had cash. But now we feel some sense of an ending: the money has dried up, the courses have closed and the epochal young writers of the future are too busy working nine to five. All we can hope is that they take early retirement. 

Bradbury’s novel about radical politics and its discontents skewered the post-1968 zeitgeist, that age of blazing up and making out. Set in 1972, it follows the Machiavellian villain Howard Kirk, a “radical sociologist” at the University of Watermouth who can “explain anything” with “a little Marx, a little Freud, and a little social history”. A Left-wing ideologue, all Kirk needs to hear is “an apparently casual remark about one’s schoolboy stamp collection, or a literary reference to the metaphoric significance of color” before he denounces you publicly for your insipid “bourgeois materialism” or racism.

Kirk is a “theoretician of sociability”, so between teaching seminars on the difference between “Gemeinschaft” and “Gesellschaft” and marking student essays with comments like “pure fascism” and “reactionary crap”, he hosts parties, arranges protests, and pursues younger women. The character Bradbury created is a comic distortion — he doesn’t exist — and yet Kirk embodies a recognizable set of social and intellectual anxieties.

Today, the British university is dramatically different: academics spend more time in redundancy pools than seminar rooms, and students use ChatGPT to summarize everything from Shakespeare soliloquies to departmental emails. And yet half a century on, Howard Kirk still has plenty to teach us about class, intellectuals, and the real importance of a university education.

Watermouth is a fictional plate-glass institution, with concrete buildings, Perspex domes, and an interdisciplinary program. It’s a radical place with something for everyone, and “a zealous equality prevails in the air”. In the campus auditorium, actors perform a communist adaptation of King Lear one week and a capitalist version of The Good Woman of Szechwan the next. On the walls, we find notices for events like “Gaysoc Elizabethan Evening: With Madrigals” and “Women’s Lib Nude Encounter Group”. There is even a “multi-denominational” chapel named, to avoid offense, the Contemplation Center.

In this time and place, the opportunistic Kirk is thriving. He receives generous royalty checks for his fashionable books — titled The Coming of the New Sex and The Defeat of Privacy — and he regularly travels to London to appear on television and opine on current affairs. Meanwhile, his wife Barbara, smarter than her husband but intellectually and emotionally unfulfilled, is begrudgingly relegated to keeping house. For everybody else, university expansion in England is on the wane, and the Watermouth campus is in decline. “The concrete has stained,” writes Bradbury, “the glass grown dirty, the services diminished.”

It’s difficult to appreciate the sense of decline felt by Bradbury and his colleagues in the new universities without realizing the original promise (and betrayal) that these institutions represented. The early Sixties saw seven “new” universities built in the English provinces, beginning with Sussex in 1961, then UEA and York in 1963, Essex and Lancaster in 1964, and finally Kent and Warwick in 1965. This expansion had been the result of a rapid increase in student numbers in the late Fifties, which continued for the next two decades. UEA, for instance, had grown from just 113 students in 1963 to 1,724 in 1967. By 1971, it had surpassed 2,600. In part, this rise was due to the baby-boomer generation’s coming-of-age, but it was also a consequence of Rab Butler’s 1944 Education Act: by removing fees from grammar schools, the Butler Act enabled children from poorer families to attend grammar school and from there go on to university.

Bradbury himself benefited from this change: born to a lower-middle-class family in Sheffield in 1932, he attended West Bridgford Grammar School in Nottingham. His closest friends, colleagues and collaborators were also children of the Butler Act, foremost Lorna Sage and David Lodge. In The History Man, we see how a life could be shaped by learning: as Bradbury puts it, Howard and Barbara Kirk “had had their sights lifted by a grammar school and university education”.

No wonder, then, that this generation thought of education as a form of training, rather than a leisure pursuit or a chance to accrue cultural capital. In 1956, Bradbury published a short article for The Antioch Review entitled “The Rise of Provincials”, in which he praised “a rigorous training in discrimination” in provincial universities like Leicester, Leeds and Hull. Bradbury saw this new education as far superior to the “Good Taste” associated with Oxford dons or with Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster.

This, then, was the intellectual origin of the “new” universities: a genuine alternative to the leisurely and complacent gentlemen’s scholarship of Oxbridge. The new universities were self-consciously novel: UEA’s founding motto, taken from an old Norfolk phrase, was “do different”. Subjects were divided not into departments but rather interdisciplinary schools. “English Studies”, for instance, combined history and literature, while “European Studies” blended languages with history.

There were other innovations too. In 1963, when Ian Watt was hired from Berkeley to be UEA’s first dean of English Studies, he brought with him the idea of teaching seminar groups of eight to 10 students. At the time, this was a West Coast idea, influenced by new developments in group therapy and the fashion for “encounter groups” (in which participants would meet to express themselves and experiment with wacky group interactions like sleep deprivation or being nude). Before then, academics either held an Oxbridge-style Socratic dialogue with one or two students, or else delivered a civic-style lecture to hundreds. (In the end, Watt himself lasted only a year at UEA before he returned to California; according to Lorna Sage, the weather in Norwich disagreed with his pet boa constrictor.)

By the end of the Sixties, the excitement about progressive teaching methods had given way to anxieties about a drop in standards, from primary schooling to postgraduate research. The Labour government had plans to replace grammar schools with comprehensives, and the May 1968 protests in France had led to a series of diminutive copycat rebellions in Britain. As Paris burned, there was a peaceful sit-in at the LSE, while at Essex bricks were chucked through windows. When Princess Margaret visited UEA in May 1968, students planned to burn a Union Jack. But struggling to find one, they decided to make their own. In the end, they were reduced to drawing one on a paper shopping bag. The makeshift flag wouldn’t catch alight, so the would-be revolutionaries just stomped on it instead.

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Later, in 1971, a 10-day sit-in was held at UEA to protest the expulsion of an American undergraduate who had received a police caution for smoking marijuana. Bradbury’s own office was trashed — the basis, perhaps, for the destruction of timorous Henry Beamish’s office in the novel. Unlike Kirk, who capitalizes on these antics for his own gain, Bradbury and his cohort of grammar school-educated provincial academics were appalled by these developments and demonstrations, which represented for them a churlish rejection of the serious-minded liberalism and free debate of the postwar university. Today, the professors are less offended: after all, it was their generation who invented student politics.

In 1969, Bradbury’s friends Brian Cox and Tony Dyson published a special issue of their journal Critical Survey titled “Fight for Education”, in which they sought to make the case against progressive education and student protest. The first of their so-called “Black Papers” (a play on government white papers), the issue carried contributions by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest (“Kingers and Conkers”, as Christopher Hitchens remembers them), and opened with a letter to MPs in which the authors claimed that anarchy “is becoming fashionable”. In a panicked tone, they wrote that university students were now “claiming the right to control syllabuses, to abolish examinations, and even to become involved in appointing their own teachers”. In one new university, students apparently objected to history or science, instead demanding to “be taught LIFE”.

The most prescient essay in the first Black Paper is “Decline and Fall of the University Idea”. Written by the pseudonymous “B”, the article lays the blame for the failure of the universities not only on student extremists, but also on university management and government policy, “with its highly rationalistic view of society and the economy”. “These are not particularly comfortable or happy times for the campus,” writes B, “and the signs are all that they will get more and more uncomfortable — especially if we end up with alienating, culturally destructive forms of rationalization that are being canvassed in some quarters, like the four-term year or other versions of the shift-system.”

As Cox wrote in his 1992 memoir, suitably titled The Great Betrayal, “Decline and Fall of the University Idea” had been published under a pseudonym because the author “so feared student reprisals that he dare not reveal his name”. This was hardly necessary, as the piece is written in Bradbury’s recognizably droll style. At one point, he quips that “governmental pressure is increasingly toward making all universities the Bowden Institute of Technology” — B.V. Bowden had been Minister for Education and Science for a short period in 1965 — whereas “student pressure is increasingly toward making them all the Che Guevara Institute of Strategic Studies”.

Looking back at The History Man, we therefore see it is as much a novel about bureaucracy and mismanagement as about radical politics. Kirk manipulates departmental meetings, moving deftly from “document A” to “document L” to “document Y”, and raising a constitutional point to ensure Professor Mangel’s visit to Watermouth goes ahead (and in doing so ensure maximum student disruption). Kirk is, deep down, a master bureaucrat: in a 1998 piece, Bradbury speculated that an older Kirk “would be enjoying his vice-chancellorship at Batley Canalside University”.

The woke students and canceled academics of The History Man may well seem familiar to readers in 2025, but really the novel is a period piece. Students today are less interested in reading or protesting than they are in mindlessly scrolling TikTok, and the young academics who teach them are precariously employed, paid by the hour to navigate Zoom calls and “virtual learning environments”. Kirk, by contrast, lands a permanent job straight after his PhD, and his monograph The Coming of the New Sex is a commercial success that generates enough royalties to renovate his house. The Howard Kirks of today are still Left-wing, but too busy editing their CVs or scrubbing mold from the walls of their tiny rented flats to even begin starting a plan for a protest.

And yet The History Man goes on being relevant. Why? Because what it can teach us — if we want to learn — is the damage that’s done to our institutions when they are hijacked by opportunists, charlatans, grifters and wreckers. The basic promise of England’s new universities has been betrayed time and again by the avaricious cost-cutting of opportunistic bureaucrats and university managers. Will we ever learn?