“unworldly men trading in third-hand ideas and verbal trinkets” Ooof.

This from the novel “Bad Timing” (based on a script for a controversial film starring Art Garfunkel, Theresa Russell, Denholm Elliott and Harvey Keitel, directed by Nicolas Roeg.

I found myself thinking that if I couldn’t seduce some hyper-intelligent professor from New York then I didn’t know New York, or academics, never having met a celibate let alone a faithful one. Academics are professionally unfaithful because as a race they’re so vain. Most of them, underneath their veneer of arrogance, are also timid, lonely, uncertain, ashamed (of what I was never clear) and terrified of being found out and exposed as unworldly men trading in third-hand ideas and verbal trinkets. But vanity is their real Achilles heel.

(James, 1980: 28)