“... of Ladbrokes (whose odds have got a great deal meaner since the days when some of us cleaned up on Salman Rushdie at 14-1), I would give only cursory attention to the books on the short-list: instead I would study the psychology and qualifications of the judges. And it does take all sorts. Three years ago, when I was short-listed for my novel Flaubert’s ...”

“... arguments have become immensely fashionable again and even radical, but only in certain quarters. Salman Rushdie might almost have been quoting from Seeley when he remarked, some time ago, that the problem with the English was that so much of their history ‘happened overseas … that they don’t know what it means’. As this suggests, one reason ...”

“... the Booker judges, and has recently been one of three judges who awarded the Booker of Bookers to Salman Rushdie. On the other hand, A Vain Conceit was described on the dustjacket as a ‘provocative antidote to Booker Prize ballyhoo’. D.J. Taylor was one of the supporting witnesses in Auberon Waugh’s recent television programme rubbishing the ...”

“... In his deceptively off-the-cuff critical style, Michael Wood writes sensitively of Naipaul and Salman Rushdie, pointing out that for Rushdie there’s no place like home in a rather more sombre sense than the phrase has in The Wizard of Oz. Wood’s thoughtful, subtle piece is one of the few in the collection ...”

“... career had disappeared into thin air. Alain Finkielkraut called him an ‘ideological monster’. Salman Rushdie nominated him ‘International Moron of the Year’ for 1999. Susan Sontag said that there were many many people who would never pick up one of his books again. Presenting the matter in the starkest possible terms, the human rights worker and ...”

“... the period we have now reached that he was looking forward. If there is no river of foaming blood, Salman Rushdie is in hiding for fear of his life because of the apparent unassimilability of Muslim communities in a society which places a high value on freedom of expression. The argument that immigration is not a matter of race but of numbers can now be ...”

“... Post-Modern author, Angela Carter uses the Gothic in the cause of political correctness, rather as Salman Rushdie and the Magic Realists have done with their related genre. In one sense, this is historically as well as politically correct, for the Gothic tale always contrasted by implication a doomed and ancient tyranny with ongoing modern enlightenment ...”

“... a place to channel all that unrequited love, and was ‘learning to be sustained by it’, while Salman Rushdie (‘Crash: Was the fatal accident a cocktail of death and desire?’) announced that ‘it has all been so disturbingly novelistic, and the novel I’m thinking of isn’t a fairy tale ... I’m thinking of J.G. Ballard’s Crash.’ Writing ...”

“... Manuscripts, recently published by the British Library.* I share the phrase with Timothy Mo, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro and Craig ‘Hurricane’ Raine; also with William Boyd, who, unlike the rest of us, adds of his manucripts that he ‘would be “very reluctant” to allow any access to them’. (This sounds pretty suspicious – what’s ...”

“... authors, meetings of over a hundred allied organisations such as the Edith Wharton Society (a Salman Rushdie Society had its formative meeting), a book exhibit, business meetings, and the annual job market. As usual, some flamboyantly-titled papers attracted the press, but after several years in which the MLA came under steady ridicule and attack ...”

“... local mosque and led by Riaz. Kureishi sets The Black Album in 1989, the year of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. It’s the burning of that book, never mentioned by name, that forces Shahid ‘to take sides’. Kureishi’s depiction of the fundamentalists is confused, however. Despite Riaz’s obvious status in the community and his dispensing of ...”

“... of state) on a book cover was too shocking. Gay novels are off limits.Then there is the case of Salman Rushdie. The scholar Liu Kaifang translated Midnight’s Children in 2002, but his publisher promptly got cold feet and the book was pulled. In 2015, another house bought the rights and published the book, using a variant translation of ...”

“... and class, before settling into detailed analyses of work by Raja Rao, R.K. Narayan, V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie and Amitav Ghosh. Ghosh is Khair’s anti-Rushdie (‘Rushdie continues to write with only a fractional awareness of the complexities of alienation’), a sort of ...”

“... But the two men made up again in the aftermath of the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini against Salman Rushdie and The Satanic Verses. ‘Never to be outdone when the electricity of violence was in the air,’ Hitchens writes, ‘[Mailer] initially had to be talked out of a hypermacho scheme to raise money for a retaliatory “hit” against the ...”

“... different rhetoric from the sort that has haunted a certain view of the Indian arts for a century. Salman Rushdie has been an iconic figure to at least some of the writers I’ve mentioned (and some have been blurbed by him), but they treat their cultural inheritance in a different way. For one thing, they’re largely, and enigmatically, silent about ...”