A delightful but decidedly unfunny encounter with the author led to a train of thought about his comic books

When I was a teenager, David Lodge, who died last week at the age of 89, meant more to me than any other writer. It wasn’t only that his novels were so wildly entertaining and funny. My parents had been born into the optimistic but class-ridden postwar world he caught with such precision, and for this reason I saw his tales of campus life as helpful guides to the more baffling aspects of adult behaviour.

There was no getting away from the fact that my father, a university lecturer, had an amazing amount in common with both conformist Philip Swallow and randy Morris Zapp, the two professors who enjoy a transatlantic exchange in Changing Places (the first of a trilogy set in Rummidge, a city modelled on Birmingham, where Lodge both lived and taught).