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blossomed into a full-blooded prime-time hit.
    It was well known at King’s that in Amsterdam in his middle twenties Malik Solanka-in the city to speak on religion and politics at a left-leaning institute funded by Faberge money-visited the Rijksmuseum and was entranced by that great treasure-trove’s displays of meticulously period-furnished dollhouses, those unique descriptions of the interior life of Holland down the ages. They were open-fronted, as if bombs had knocked away their facades; or like little theaters, which he completed by being there. He was their fourth wall. He began to see everything in Amsterdam as if miniaturized: his own hotel on the Herengracht, the Anne Frank house, the impossibly good-looking Surinamese women. It was a trick of the mind to see human life made small, reduced to doll size. Young Solanka approved of the results. A little modesty about the scale of human endeavor was to be desired. Once you had thrown that switch in your head, the hard thing was to see in the old way. Small was beautiful, as Schumacher had just then begun to say.
    Day after day, Malik visited the Rijksmuseum dollhouses. Never before in his life had he thought of making anything with his hands. Now his head was full of chisels and glue, rags and needles, scissors and paste. He envisioned wallpaper and soft furnishings, dreamed bedsheets, designed bathroom fixtures. After a few visits, however, it became clear that mere houses would not be enough for him. His imaginary environments must be peopled. Without people there was no point. The Dutch dollhouses, for all their intricacy and beauty, and in spite of their ability to furnish and decorate his imagination, finally made him think of the end of the world, some strange cataclysm in which property had remained undamaged while all breathing creatures had been destroyed. (This was some years before the invention of that ultimate revenge of the inanimate upon the living, the neutron bomb.) After he had this idea, the place began to revolt him. He started imagining back rooms in the museum filled with giant heaps of the miniature dead: birds, animals, children, servants, actors, ladies, lords. One day he walked out of the great museum and never went back to Amsterdam again.
    On his return to Cambridge he immediately started to construct microcosms of his own. From the beginning his dollhouses were the products of an idiosyncratic personal vision. They were fanciful at first, even fabulist; science-fiction plunges into the mind of the future instead of the past, which had already and unimprovably been captured by the miniaturist masters of the Netherlands. This sci-fi phase didn’t last long. Solanka soon learned the value of working, like the great matadors, closer to the bull; that is, using the material of his own life and immediate surroundings and, by the alchemy of art, making it strange. His insight, which Eleanor would have called a “lightbulb moment,” eventually led to a series of “Great Minds” dolls, often arranged in little tableaux-Bertrand Russell being clubbed by policemen at a wartime pacifist rally, Kierkegaard going to the opera for the interval so that his friends didn’t think he was working too hard, Machiavelli being subjected to the excruciating torture known as the strappado, Socrates drinking his inevitable hemlock, and Solanka’s favorite, a two-faced, four-armed Galileo: one face muttered the truth under its breath, while one pair o£ arms, hidden in the folds of his garments, secreted a little model of the earth spinning around the sun; the other face, downcast and penitent under the stern gaze of the men in the red frocks, publicly recanted its knowledge, while a copy of the Bible was tightly, devoutly clutched by the second pair of arms. Years later, when Solanka quit the academy, these dolls would go to work for him. These, and the questing knowledge-seeker he created to be their television interrogator and the audience’s surrogate,