Expo 58

‘Now hold on a minute,’ said Thomas. ‘What we do at the COI can hardly be described as propaganda.’
‘Really? But what else would you call it?’
‘Well, as our name suggests, we deal in information.’
‘Yes, but it’s not as simple as that. In your publications and your exhibitions, you select certain pieces of information, and reject others. You present them in a certain way. These are political choices. We’re all doing it. That’s why we are all sitting here in Brussels. We’ve come to sell ourselves to the rest of the world.’

that America was a shallow, vulgar, uncivilized place. He understood the allure of the image it was at pains to present to the world – a bold, insistent image, projected in Technicolor and VistaVision – but he was immune to it. Something within him rebelled against the idea of seeing a film which celebrated this way of life, even in the guise (hypocritical, he was sure) of a lurid melodrama which purported to expose its cracks and fault line

‘Mr Chersky had the sachet.’
‘He had the sachet and the packet.’
‘He had the sachet and the packet in his pocket.’
‘He had the sachet and the packet in the pocket of his jacket.’

‘I always thought that Russians said Na zdorovie when they were making a toast,’ she said.
‘A popular myth,’ Andrey explained. ‘We say it to foreigners, because – knowing no better – they say it to us, and we are too polite to embarrass them.

Andrey has a deep love for all things British. He has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Sherlock Holmes stories, seems to have committed the London Underground map to memory and has developed a passion for – of all things – Smith’s potato crisps, of which Mr Rossiter keeps a steady supply. He collects the little salt sachets, which he says he is going to show to his nieces and nephews when he returns to Moscow.

He stopped, at this point, to attend to his packet of crisps. Having torn it open, he extracted a crisp and stared at the unfamiliar object with amused wonderment. ‘Forgive me for asking,’ he said, ‘but one is supposed to eat this, yes?’
‘That’s the general idea,’ said Tony.

he delivered his inaugural speech. A speech in which he expressed his view that humanity was standing at a crossroads, and that it faced two paths, one which led towards peace and one which led to destruction. He recommended, on the whole, taking the first of these paths. It was a fine, wise and memorable speech, most people agreed afterwards

‘Really?’ said Thomas. ‘I mean . . . I didn’t intend to.’
‘Of course you didn’t. But this is a dangerous place, you know. Can’t you feel it? Strange things could happen here, if we don’t all keep our heads.’

‘The American pavilion,’ Anneke explained. ‘And here is the Soviet one, right next door. Which,’ she added, with a gleam in her eye, ‘is a typical example of the Belgian sense of humour.’
The Soviet pavilion presented a powerful contrast. It conceded nothing in terms of scale, but the heroic simplicity of its design offered a kind of reprimand to American pretension and vulgarity. It was a giant cuboid, constructed from steel and glass, swelling towards the sky almost as far as Thomas’s eye could see as the car eased its way past and he craned his neck out of the window, looking upwards in open-mouthed astonishment. The walls of the pavilion were of corrugated glass, giving it a lightness and openness which belied its dimensions: as if in implied rebuke to Westerners who might have assumed that the very concept of transparency was unknown in the USSR.

A recent study has shown,’ Thomas explained carefully, ‘that there may be a link between smoking and lung cancer.’
‘Funny,’ Mr Swaine mused, aloud. ‘I always feel much healthier after a gasper or two.’
There was an embarrassed pause.