The Smarty Pant-iad

Reviewers this week flexed their intellectual muscles as they got to grips with clever clogs Edward St Aubyn’s latest novel.  His roman-a-clef At Last was a double boon: the perfect opportunity not only to indulge in a spot of sordid literary gossip but also to parade their mastery of the Literae Humaniores. And in numbers as mighty as the Achaeans swarming on Trojan plains, they did both. Caroline Moore in the Telegraph tried to trump the account of childhood rape – which  almost became banal when trotted out in every single review – with this biographical anecdote:

“He turned up to sit his Oxford finals armed with the shaft of an empty Biro for snorting heroin, but without a conventionally filled pen.”

Otherwise the antics of the St Aubyn’s family, a clan who, according to Philip Womack in the Telegraph, could “compete with the House of Atreus in terms of neuroses” provided, like Tityos’ liver in the Sibyl’s hellish vision (Aen.VI.