One of the three main characters in VN's novel Pale Fire (1962) is Jakob Gradus (Shade's murderer). At the end of his commentary to Shade's poem Kinbote (who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) mentions a bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus:
"And you, what will you be doing with yourself, poor King, poor Kinbote?" a gentle young voice may inquire.
God will help me, I trust, to rid myself of any desire to follow the example of the other two characters in this work. I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist. I may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy, healthy heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile, sans fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his art. I may join forces with Odon in a new motion picture: Escape from Zembla (ball in the palace, bomb in the palace square). I may pander to the simple tastes of theatrical critics and cook up a stage play, an old-fashioned melodrama with three principles: a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, and perishes in the clash between the two figments. Oh, I may do many things! History permitting, I may sail back to my recovered kingdom, and with a great sob greet the gray coastline and the gleam of a roof in the rain. I may huddle and groan in a madhouse. But whatever happens, wherever the scene is laid, somebody, somewhere, will quietly set out--somebody has already set out, somebody still rather far away is buying a ticket, is boarding a bus, a ship, a plane, has landed, is walking toward a million photographers, and presently he will ring at my door--a bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus. (note to Line 1000)
From Karl Schmude's 2009 essay "G.K. Chesterton and Malcolm Muggeridge: A Balance of Opposites:"
At a later time, Muggeridge came to believe that, even more than newspapers, the visual media offered phenomenal possibilities of fabrication and self-delusion. In 1976, delivering some invited lectures in London on “Christ and the Media,” he reflected on how the modern media might have handled the appearance of Christ in Galilee. Muggeridge conceived a fourth temptation – added to the actual three which the Devil put to Christ in the desert. He imagined a Roman media tycoon, whom he called Lucius Gradus the Elder (in a rather mischievous reference to the British entertainment tycoon, Lew Grade, known by his critics as “Low Grade”). Gradus had heard Jesus speak in Galilee and realised that, properly presented and promoted, this barely known figure in a remote province could achieve worldwide star quality.