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Staying Alive in the Ruins

Richard J. Evans: Plato to Nato, 22 April 2021

Ruin and Renewal: Civilising Europe after World War Two 
by Paul Betts.
Profile, 536 pp., £25, November 2020, 978 1 78816 109 1
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... civilisation was in crisis, fanned ten years later by Khomeini’s incitement to Muslims to kill Salman Rushdie after the publication of The Satanic Verses. When the end of the Cold War determined that Russia could no longer serve as the antithesis of civilisation in the eyes of Christian conservatives, Islam provided a handy substitute. ‘Global ...

White Happy Doves

Nikil Saval: The Real Mo Yan, 29 August 2013

Change 
by Mo Yan, translated by Howard Goldblatt.
Seagull, 117 pp., £9, October 2012, 978 0 85742 160 9
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Sandalwood Death 
by Mo Yan, translated by Howard Goldblatt.
Oklahoma, 409 pp., £16, January 2013, 978 0 8061 4339 2
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Pow! 
by Mo Yan, translated by Howard Goldblatt.
Seagull, 440 pp., £19.50, December 2012, 978 0 85742 076 3
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... dweller under state socialism, Herta Müller, called the choice ‘a catastrophe’. On Facebook, Salman Rushdie said Mo Yan was like ‘Mikhail Sholokhov, a patsy of the regime’ (Rushdie perhaps wasn’t aware that Sholokhov is Mo Yan’s favourite Russian writer). Only Pankaj Mishra, writing in the Guardian, took a ...

Diary

Sanjay Subrahmanyam: Another Booker Flop, 6 November 2008

... assertions in the Indian press, another attempt at a form of Indian magical realism in the wake of Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy. No one has telepathic or supernatural powers here; time is broadly Newtonian in its flow. This is a novel that wants to be realistic, even if the realism is meant to be understood as tinged with black comedy. There may even ...

Longing for Mao

Hugo Young: Edward Heath, 26 November 1998

The Curse of My Life: My Autobiography 
by Edward Heath.
Hodder, 767 pp., £25, October 1998, 0 340 70852 2
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... says whose side he’s still unfailingly on, by sucking up to Iran’s leaders and explaining that Salman Rushdie had no right to cause offence to the Muslim world. His favourite theatre of après-power experience is China, which he never visited as prime minister, but where for many years the powers-that-be seem to have imagined that he remained the ...

Why Bosnia matters

Christopher Hitchens, 10 September 1992

... Croats of wanting to proclaim a fundamentalist republic, what he thought of the fatwah condemning Salman Rushdie. He gave the reply of the moderate Muslim, saying that he did not like and had not read the book but could not agree to violence against the author. It is possible to meet the occasional Bosnian Muslim fanatic, and it is true that some of them ...

First Filipino

Benedict Anderson, 16 October 1997

Noli Me Tangere 
by José Rizal, translated by Soledad Lacson-Locsin.
Hawaii, 451 pp., $47, June 1997, 0 8248 1917 9
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... as the friend, something that did not happen with the Raj until the work, a century later, of Salman Rushdie. Rizal could not know it, but there were to be huge costs involved in choosing to write in Spanish. Five years after his martyrdom, a greedy and barbarous American imperialism destroyed the independent Republic of the Philippines, and reduced ...

The Paranoid Sublime

Andrew O’Hagan, 26 May 1994

How late it was, how late 
by James Kelman.
Secker, 374 pp., £14.99, March 1994, 0 436 23292 8
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... titled ‘English Literature and the Small Coterie’, where Kelman writes of the failings of Salman Rushdie, in a way which might cause us to pause on his own technique: In a literary context one of the limited ways of using the stereotype technique creatively is to turn a prejudice on its head: the ‘stereotyped’ character is then revealed as ...

Always on Top

Edward Said: From Birmingham to Jamaica, 20 March 2003

Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830-67 
by Catherine Hall.
Polity, 556 pp., £60, April 2002, 0 7456 1820 0
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... of Africa and Asia would sink. Not surprisingly, the Iranian Revolution and the fatwa against Salman Rushdie consolidated anti-anti-colonial feeling in the 1980s and 1990s, making it easy to see the Taliban as a natural consequence of native intransigence and misplaced Western liberalism. Naipaul’s was only the most virulent example of colonial ...

Born to Lying

Theo Tait: Le Carré, 3 December 2015

John le Carré: The Biography 
by Adam Sisman.
Bloomsbury, 652 pp., £25, October 2015, 978 1 4088 2792 5
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... reviews, his celebrity friendships (with Alec Guinness and Stephen Fry), his celebrity spats (with Salman Rushdie). There is little about his son from his second marriage, Nicholas (who writes as Nick Harkaway), and practically nothing about his relationships with his three sons from the first marriage. We’re told that he felt discouraged from writing ...

Oedipal Wrecks

Michael Mason, 26 March 1992

Fates Worse than Death 
by Kurt Vonnegut.
Cape, 240 pp., £14.99, October 1991, 0 224 02918 5
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... and its successors. He has joked rather brutally that he considered putting a contract out’ on Salman Rushdie for a bad review of Hocus Pocus (1990). Some of the harsh judgments have come from writers personally closer to him than Rushdie, and inflicted correspondingly deeper wounds. But what is Vonnegut’s own ...

Infinite Artichoke

James Butler: Italo Calvino’s Politics, 15 June 2023

The Written World and the Unwritten World: Collected Non-Fiction 
by Italo Calvino, translated by Ann Goldstein.
Penguin, 384 pp., £10.99, January, 978 0 14 139492 3
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... fascist bombings. Shouldn’t they disturb, even slightly, the limpid surface of his stories? For Salman Rushdie, writing in the LRB in 1981, Calvino was uncanny, protean, always one disconcerting step ahead of the reader. But Rushdie wondered why anyone should bother with ‘a word-juggler, a fantasist’ when cities ...

Islam and Reform

Akeel Bilgrami, 28 June 1990

A Satanic Affair: Salman Rushdie and the Rage of Islam 
by Malise Ruthven.
Chatto, 184 pp., £14.95, February 1990, 0 7011 3591 3
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... It is not possible to write about Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, and the Muslim response to it, without writing about the nature and history of Islam, the lives and problems of the immigrant population of British Muslims, and the effects of Western colonialism and Cold War politics in parts of the world where there are large Muslim populations ...

What are we allowed to say?

David Bromwich, 22 September 2016

... to effect improvements that will convey a better life to all. Violent threats like the fatwa on Salman Rushdie and violent acts like the assassinations at Charlie Hebdo remind us that a militant religion is a dangerous carrier of the demand for the purification of words and images. Meanwhile, since the fall of Soviet communism, liberal bureaucrats in ...

An Infinity of Novels

Philip Horne, 14 September 1989

A Short Guide to the World Novel: From Myth to Modernism 
by Gilbert Phelps.
Routledge, 397 pp., £30, September 1988, 0 415 00765 8
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The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction 
by John Sutherland.
Longman, 696 pp., £35, March 1989, 0 582 49040 5
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The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875-1914 
by Peter Keating.
Secker, 533 pp., £30, September 1989, 0 436 23248 0
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... where Gilbert Phelps in his connected prose, with everything everywhere from the year dot to Salman Rushdie as his portion, is frequently reduced to inoffensive and distantly non-committal generality. Blandness is not a danger for Sutherland. ‘Single authorship risks a high degree of error and bias,’ as he says in the Preface, ‘but sometimes ...

What Is Great about Ourselves

Pankaj Mishra: Closing Time, 21 September 2017

The Retreat of Western Liberalism 
by Edward Luce.
Little, Brown, 240 pp., £16.99, May 2017, 978 1 4087 1041 8
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The Fate of the West: Battle to Save the World’s Most Successful Political Idea 
by Bill Emmott.
Economist, 257 pp., £22, May 2017, 978 1 61039 780 3
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The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics 
by David Goodhart.
Hurst, 256 pp., £20, March 2017, 978 1 84904 799 9
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The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics 
by Mark Lilla.
Harper, 143 pp., £20, August 2017, 978 0 06 269743 1
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The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam 
by Douglas Murray.
Bloomsbury, 343 pp., £18.99, May 2017, 978 1 4729 4224 1
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... multiculturalism has been popular in Britain’s right-wing press since Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie. And there is nothing ‘post-liberal’ about arguments for a less diverse population. Liberalism, flatteringly identified by Goodhart with cosmopolitan tolerance, has long been more at home with nationalism, imperialism and even ...

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