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“... Prague. I suppose revolutions always attract the wrong people. When I was at Oxford in 1956 some smart Balliol undergraduates felt that the Hungarian Uprising would benefit from their presence. They sent round an appeal for funds, pointing out that a contingent was going from Cambridge, so it was important that Oxford should not be unrepresented, history for ...”

“... aria by Mozart. Mr Pickens is relaxing at an amateur operatic production, feeling pretty smart in his new tie from Fraternity Row, over in Mississippi. But there are bad omens – the lady in the mink stole, the kind that had the heads left on it, the eyes ‘small, black, vicious beads that glared at him in outrage’, and the change in the ...”

“... No sooner are these stern words out of his mouth, though, than they are smilingly disclaimed: ‘Don’t take me too seriously!’ He only does it to annoy, you see, because he knows it teases. John Sparrow has been teasing us now for almost fifty years. Often the tease has been intensely serious, effected in the name of high ...”

“... honest, decent and stupid, becomes a soldier; Yuri Sharok, the son of a tailor who clothes most of smart Moscow, guileful and deceitful, goes into the NKVD and employs as an informer the pretty and promiscuous Vika Marasevich. But though these, and other characters, take up a good deal of space in the novel, they are ultimately unimportant: Rybakov uses them ...”

“... big brain. In conversation about his novel, Vonnegut has asked: ‘what’s so great about being smart?’ It’s an oddly Christian message that one finally gets from Galapagos. Except ye become as lobotomised sea lions, ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven. Some chance, Vonnegut. At the heart of Galapagos is an exhausted misanthropy trying ...”

“... the dilemma there are some lively scenes: a trip to Cambridge where a preposterous Girton don serves beans (thinking Giles will be embarrassing with a knife in his hand); a raucous Christmas visit to Giles’s aseptic house by Miss Agar’s mum; adventures with a diabolically randy schoolboy, determined to ‘have it off’ with Tibba. Wilson indulges ...”

“... Robert Stone was born in August 1937, nine months after Don DeLillo and three – we’re told – after Thomas Pynchon. Dog Soldiers, his second novel, made his name in the mid-1970s, and since then he has stubbornly held his ground on the upper slopes of American literary life. Fellowships, prizes, grants and commissions have rarely been in short supply, and his later books – from A Flag for Sunrise to Damascus Gate – have been much admired ...”

“... I was in the sixth form at Leeds Modern School and reading for a scholarship to Cambridge. The smart book around that time was Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History, which took the 19th century to task for writing history with one eye on the future, and in particular for taking as the only path through the past the development of ...”

“... chosen, presumably, by Maschler – depicts him lounging, wolfishly handsome and casually smart, at his desk in Bedford Square, doing a deal on one phone with two others waiting: deals, deals, deals. Whatever the literary quality of Publisher – a book which seems to have been dictated down one of these phones – Maschler’s achievements as a ...”

“... importance of the pre-war Cambridge connection, with one exception. That is John Cairncross, a non-smart Cambridge man of Scottish working-class background, who though detected in 1951 did not come to public notice until 1979. His work on a wartime desk in Rome is said by Pincher to have enabled the Russians ‘to secure a direct reading of the Allied plans ...”

“... once, under Peron in the Forties. Peron was a fascist and a populist who liked to put down the smart, salon-dwelling European culture for which Borges stood. Borges had been for the Allies in the war of 1939-45, and he was against Peron, who had been for Hitler and Mussolini. Borges signed manifestos against the dictator and the dictator, famously, took ...”

“... evidence or bomb the rubble. How wrong! It wasn’t so much that he flushed out Professor Blunt: smart fellows about Cambridge and St James’s seem to have known all about Blunt for years. It was – first – that Boyle opened out the whole American dimension of the affair, through the FBI/CIA files and the secret chronicles of James Jesus Angleton ...”

“... funny woman who had appeared in one of his movies. By that time Warhol had come to represent what Don DeLillo has called ‘the revenge of popular culture on those who take it too seriously’. Warhol outlined a new sort of wanting. America is there in his paintings, and the things people wanted – a Coke, a perfection, a quick end – are documented in a ...”

“... time is the thing that slips away: No but you see I’ve got to explain all this because I don’t, we don’t know how much time there is left and I have to work on the, to finish this work of mine while I, why I’ve brought in this whole pile of books notes pages clippings and God knows what, get it all sorted and ...”

“... after that. The Americans therefore looked kindly on a conspiracy to assassinate Trujillo, but don’t seem to have provided much help beyond a few guns. The novel has a triple storyline, and the narrative machinery, although skilfully assembled, creaks a bit for the first third or so of the book. We meet Urania Cabral, a Dominican-born woman who is now a ...”