Thus writes Salman Rushdie of his protagonist Professor Malik Solanka who resigns from his job at King's College, Cambridge opting out of the academy and cashing in on the lucrative world of television to make a series of 'popular history-of-philosophy' programmes. The programme is eventually a success and is aired under the title 'The Adventures of Little Brain'. It stars his collection of 'outsize egghead dolls', all made by himself, representing great thinkers. The chief 'knowledge-seeker' is the 'female time-travelling doll Little Brain' - echoing other Rushdie characters who journey through space and time, including Gibreel Farishta in The Satanic Verses, shuttling between twentieth-century Britain and seventh-century 'Jahilia', and Flapping Eagle in Grimus who falls through a hole in the Mediterranean into a different dimension. Little Brain is a 'hip, fashion-conscious, but still idealistic Candide, his Valiant-For-Truth in urban-guerrilla threads, his spiky-haired girl Basho journeying, mendicant bowl in hand, far into the Deep North of Japan'. She is the only doll he falls in love with and who breaks his heart. Appropriated by popular television she is turned into a celebrity and her intellect dumbed down for the mainstream viewing public.