Coe's hero is Thomas Foley, a young copy-writer at the Central Office of Information, who lives with his dull wife in a dull house in the dull London suburb of Tooting: all very Fifties, at least as seen through today's spectacles. He is plucked out of his discontented security by his civil service masters to manage the Britannia, a pub that formed part of the British pavilion at Expo 58 (I don't remember it but I was only ten). Rather like my father's experiences a decade or so earlier, Foley's time in Brussels is a blissful escape from the tedium of postwar London. He falls in love with a Belgian girl who is an Expo guide, but he also becomes embroiled in Cold War espionage, under the benevolent watch of a comical pair of British agents, Mr Radford and Mr Wayne, who appear to owe something to Tintin's detective friends Dupont and Dupond (later anglicised to Thomson and Thompson).

The plotting is pretty thin and predictable, both in terms of spy story and romance, but Coe has done his homework about Expo and the Fifties and his elegant and witty writing style keeps the reader interested to the end. He does a good job in capturing some of the idealistic atmosphere that pervaded the era and is perhaps the main factor in the revival of interest in it.

I caught a glimpse of the Atomium recently, rusting away in the distance, as our train to Amsterdam left Brussels. These days the Brussels world fair is to be found in the halls and corridors of the European Commission and Parliament, and the idealism of Expo 58 has long been replaced by the ruthless conformity of the European Union.