David Lodge was born in London in 1935. He was educated at University College, London, where he took his BA degree in 1955 and his MA in 1959. In between he did National Service in the British Army. He holds a doctorate from the University of Birmingham, where he taught in the English Department from 1960 until 1987, when he retired to become a full-time writer. He retains the title of Honorary Professor of Modern English Literature at Birmingham and continues to live in that city. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

    His novels include The Picturegoers (1960); Ginger, You're Barmy (1962); The British Museum is Falling Down (1965); Out of the Shelter (1970); Changing Places (1975), for which he was awarded both the Hawthornden Prize and the Yorkshire Post Fiction Prize; How Far Can You Go?, which was Whitbread Book of the Year in 1980; Small World, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1984; Nice Work, which won the 1988 Sunday Express Book of the Year Award and was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Paradise News (1991) and Therapy (1995). His work has been translated into more than twenty languages and many of his books are published by Penguin.

   David Lodge has written several books on literary criticism, such as Language of Fiction (1966), The Novelist at the Crossroads (1971), The Modes of Modern Writing (1977), Working with Structuralism (1981) and After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism (1990). He has also edited Modern Criticism and Theory (1988); Scenes of Clerical Life for Penguin Classics; and Lucky Jim for Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics. In addition Penguin have published Write On (1986), a collection of occasional essays and The Art of Fiction (1992), a selection of articles originally published in the Independent on Sunday.

   Small World was adapted as a television serial in 1988 and he himself adapted Nice Work, which won the Royal Television Society's Award for the best drama serial of 1989 and a Silver Nymph at the International Television Festival in Monte Carlo in 1990. In 1994 he adapted Martin Chuzzlewit for a six-part BBC serial. His first stage play, The Writing Game, was produced at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1990, and he adapted it for Channel 4 in 1995.

   Or that's the heartfelt belief of conscripts Jonathan Browne and Mike 'Ginger' Brady. For this is the British Army in the days of National Service, a grimy deposit of post-war cynicism. It consists of one endless, shambling round of kit layout, square-bashing, shepherd's pie 'made from real shepherds', P.T. and drill relieved by the occasional lecture on firearms or V.D. Reckless, impulsive Mike and the more pragmatic Jonathan adopt radically different attitudes to this two-year confiscation of their freedom ... and the consequences are dramatic.

- A. N. Wilson in the Spectator

- Selina Hastings in the Daily Telegraph

   The restrictions of a wartime childhood in London and subsequent post-war shortages have done little to enrich Timothy's early youth.

    But everything changes when his glamorous older sister Kath invites him to spend the summer at Heidelberg. Kath, who has long since left home to work for the American army, introduces her sixteen-year-old brother to a lifestyle that is deliriously fast, furious and extravagant. Dazzled by the indulgent habits of the American forces, but at the same time sensitive to the broken spirits of the German community beneath this sparkling surface, Timothy will find that his summer holiday is in more ways than one an unforgettable rite of passage.