“... good). Franzen’s willingness to give a junior colleague a leg-up is surpassed only by that of Salman Rushdie, J.M. Coetzee and Thomas Pynchon. There’s clearly a connection between reclusiveness and readiness to puff, even if Rushdie’s withdrawal from the public eye was neither voluntary nor permanent. Maybe ...”

“... the idea that they may be living in a metropolitan bubble, but René Unterlinden, the narrator of Salman Rushdie’s latest book, has been raised to call the bubble his home. ‘De point is,’ his father – not the only character in the novel with a comic accent – tells him, ‘we like de bubble, and so do you … So dis iss who you are … The boy ...”

“... Centre. An exhaustion centre is what she will soon be in need of.’ Or a verbal decoke, perhaps? Salman Rushdie, on the other hand, is far too impetuous and fantastical to have written a sentence like that. He, too, goes in for lists, but they are to Lodge’s as a magic spell is to the local business directory. ...”

“... Various covers of past issues were on display, I seem to recall; one of them had a photograph of Salman Rushdie, which I looked at disbelievingly, as you might at someone you’d known as a child, who’d become famous for some unforeseeable feat, like holding their breath for ten minutes underwater, or journeying to Jupiter; for the fatwa had been ...”

“... irrealism the terminology of V. Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale, by way of demonstrating that Salman Rushdie’s story has a perfectly normal structure. Temporal-Spatial Determination (‘There was once, in the kingdom of Alifbay, a sad city ...’); Composition of the Family (Haroun, the Future Hero, his father Rashid, a professional ...”

“... Donk’ and their third ‘The Mong’, or, decades later, when the fatwa was declared on Salman Rushdie, wear a giant home-made badge saying ‘I AM Salman Rushdie’? Like it or not, the joke is pure Mitford (as was Decca’s voice, described by Philip Toynbee as ‘a curiously cadenced sing-song which ...”

“... The Moor’s last sigh is several things, both inside and outside Salman Rushdie’s sprawling new novel. It is the defeated farewell of the last Moorish ruler in Spain, the Sultan Boabdil leaving his beloved Granada in 1492, a year also known for other travels. It is Othello’s last gasp of jealousy and violence ...”

“... and changed himself, instead of being the helpless subject of a pretty tale of metamorphosis. Salman Rushdie’s new novel is full of such Neoplatonic jokes (though this isn’t one of them). The Ground beneath Her Feet is vertiginous, perilous, on the edge, because it’s all about pushing beyond the author’s Other-love, and the techniques he has ...”

“... divorced, resident of Willesden. So she did go to Cambridge, but then there’s always a catch. Salman Rushdie called White Teeth ‘fizzing’ – and it’s been called many similar things since – which may sound a little misplaced with its hint of champagne, but it captures something of the boldness and variety of a novel that is 462 pages long ...”

“... a good deal more real than the pallid place Alice escaped from to come here. This is a film, as Salman Rushdie says of The Wizard of Oz, ‘about the joys of going away, of leaving the greyness and entering the colour’, although the greyness in Alice is purely metaphorical. But maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned The Wizard of Oz, because there are ...”

“... Hamilton and Ted Hughes on the life of Sylvia Plath, Alison Lurie’s obituary of Mary McCarthy, Salman Rushdie on Graham Greene, Claire Tomalin on Coleridge, Anthony Burgess on Fielding, other reviews by Anita Brookner, Peter Conrad, Roy Foster and Hilary Mantel), and as the limits on the new paper’s resources became apparent I thought how hard it ...”

“... excavates the story behind Géricault’s famous painting, ‘The Raft of the “Medusa” ’.) Salman Rushdie sums up Barnes’s achievement eloquently: ‘what he offers us is the novel as footnote to history, as subversion of the given, as brilliant elaborate doodle around the margins of what we know we think about what we think we know.’ Another ...”

“... anyone else. He had no such compunctions when the Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced a fatwa sentencing Salman Rushdie to death, and was still going on about it in 2006 on al-Jazeera. ‘If the faithful had carried out Ayatollah Khomeini’s injunction and killed the apostate Rushdie,’ he said on that occasion, ‘the ...”

“... and cruel as well. Too much new Indian fiction has carried the birthmark of Midnight’s Children; Salman Rushdie himself, in the Preface to his recent Vintage Book of Indian Writing,* admits that his successors can seem marked by an ‘excessive Rushdie-itis’. How could they not, when even an older writer like Anita ...”

“... argued fiercely about the evils of radical Islam at the time of the fatwa against his good friend Salman Rushdie, and he was pro-intervention in Bosnia. But 9/11 ‘exhilarated’ him and gave him a new sense of purpose. It also, I think, made him more than just the single most influential polemicist acting on behalf of the war-prosecutorial ...”