John Mullan, who teaches English at University College, has a note in the Guardian on the roman-à-clef. Mullan uses the novels of John Banville to describe aspects of the roman-à-clef–a novel in which actual persons are presented under fictional names. “The thinness of its disguises,” Mullan writes, “has always been the point of a roman-à-clef.” A case in point is the character named Querrell, who is in reality Graham Greene, in Banville’s The Untouchable, a novel “about” Anthony Blunt, “the knighted curator of the Queen’s pictures who publicly admitted in 1979 that he had been a Soviet spy for decades.” I was struck by Mullan’s observation that “Greene actually played no part in Blunt’s story, so the cameo is opportunistically venomous, as characters in a roman-à-clef often are.” Querrell is described with delicious malice: “He was genuinely curious about people - the sure mark of the second-rate novelist.”