Noam Chomsky, 76, has been voted the world’s top public intellectual by Prospect magazine, but he has no interest in that. “He believes that there is a misconception about what it means to be smart. It is not a question of wit, as with no 5 on the list (Christopher Hitchens) or poetic dash like no 4 (Vaclav Havel), or the sort of articulacy that lends itself to television appearances, like no 37, the thinking girl’s pin-up Michael Ignatieff, whom Chomsky calls an apologist for the establishment and dispenser of ‘garbage’. Chomsky, by contrast, speaks in a barely audible croak and of his own, largely unsuccessful, television appearances has written dismissively: ‘The beauty of concision is that you can only repeat conventional thoughts.’ Being smart, he believes, is a function of a plodding, unsexy, application to the facts and ‘using your intelligence to decide what’s right’.”