Inside Trading

(Paperback)

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The only full-length stage play by the acclaimed novelist and critic Malcolm Bradbury

Set in Battenberg's, an ancient London merchant bank with a proud tradition and a suspect past, Inside Trading centres on a rogue trader whose ambitions for his own survival draw in government, European funding and widespread millennial fantasies.

Inside Trading is based on a German satire of 1933 by Paul Vulpius. Bradbury, drawing on the climate of City trading in the nineties, has moved the play to an age of the dream-filled and scheme-saturated millennium, the age of the big deal and the rogue trader. The result is a satirical comedy in the spirit of Bradbury's prose work.

Author Bio

Malcolm Bradbury was a novelist, critic, television dramatist and Emeritus Professor of American Studies at the University of East Anglia. He wrote many novels, including: Eating People is Wrong (1959); Stepping Westward (1965); The History Man (1975), which won the Royal Society of Literature Heinemann Prize and was adapted for television; Rates of Exchange (1983), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Cuts: A Very Short Novel (1987) Doctor Criminale (1992) and To the Hermitage (2000). His critical works include The Modern American Novel (1984, revised 1992), No Not Bloomsbury (essays, 1987), The Modern World: Ten Great Writers (1989), From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature (with Richard Ruland, 1993) and The Modern British Novel (1994). He also edited The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories (1988), Modernism (with James McFarlane, 1991), Dangerous Pilgrimages (1995) and The Atlas of Literature (1996). He was the author of Who Do You Think You Are (1993), a collection of seven stories and nine parodies, and of several works of humour and satire, including Why Come to Slaka (1992), Unsent Letters (revised edition, 1995) and Mensonge (1993). He wrote several television 'novels' including The Gravy Train and The Gravy Train Goes East, and adapted other works for television including Tom Sharpe's Porterhouse Blue, Kingsley Amis's The Green Man, Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm (also released as a feature film), wrote episodes of A Touch of Frost and Dalziel and Pascoe. In 1991, he was awarded the CBE, before being knighted in the New Year's List in 2000. He died later that year.