Doctor Criminale

'Eminently readable . . . perceptive and poignant' Time Out

A London Magazine Book of the Year

Francis Jay is a man of the nineties. Street-wise but eco-friendly, smart yet charmingly naive, when his journalism career falls on the rocks he sets out to salvage it by embarking on a quest to write about one of the greatest philosophers of the modern age for a TV documentary. The myth of Doctor Bazlo Criminale proves almost impossible to penetrate, but Jay doggedly pursues the doctor from congress to congress, from woman to woman and from muse to muse: just who is the mysterious Criminale?

Written after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Malcolm Bradbury's Doctor Criminale shows a world where old ideologies are coming apart at the seams.

'An energetic satire of literary journalism and literary theory in the post-postmodern nineties . . . A relic of a time when we respected intelligence enough to satirise it' - The London Magazine

Part of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature.

Paperback / softback | 352 pages | Published October 2025