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. This classic comic novel seized and expressed the mood of those who came of age in the 1950s. Amis caught the mood of postwar restiveness in a book which is both socially significant and extremely funny.