“I really think that you should read Caledonian Road,” a colleague advised me, soon after the publication of Andrew O’Hagan’s state-of-the-nation novel. “The main character is actually a member of this department.” It sounded more like a warning than a recommendation. But what he said was true. O’Hagan’s protagonist, Campbell Flynn, described in the prefatory “Cast of Characters” as a “celebrity academic”, is a professor in the English department at University College London, of which I am currently the head. I read with foreboding. Would there be recognisable character sketches? Which of our institutional follies would be skewered? What picture of the state of academic Eng Lit would be drawn?
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