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“... writers for whom lost homelands and hyphenated identities appear inspiring, even rather fun – Salman Rushdie, for example. But, perhaps inevitably, Gurnah’s experiences seem to have been devastating. The regrets and guilt of the exile, the divided loyalties of the colonial scholarship boy, prejudice and alienation in Britain: these are the constant ...”

“... of manners. It is markedly forthcoming both of himself and his opinions: he is no more loth than Salman Rushdie has sometimes been to give offence. He speaks of a ‘static, decayed society’. He says that he’d gone to India with a vague sense of caste and a Hindu ‘horror of the unclean’, and he emerges from the book a seasoned ...”

“... poetic and elliptical ... a world novel in every sense to rank alongside the best of Coetzee, Salman Rushdie ... and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’. Does Malouf deserve such backers – and perhaps the Booker as well? Maybe he does; maybe they all deserve one another. Here are his final paragraphs: Out beyond the flatlands the line of light pulses and ...”

“... fiction has been. What else is Kafka’s Metamorphosis? And Grass, Marquez and, most recently, Salman Rushdie work to a similar conception. Possibly, in being playfully aware that it is dreamlike, The Hotel New Hampshire takes dreaming too lightly, like those dream-films where, at the end of the story, someone ‘wakes up’ – something that could ...”

“... of European readers, the most disreputable instance of velayat in action is the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. In this new order, there was no room for lay religious enthusiasts. Shari‘ati had died, in a sort of despair, in Southampton in 1977. Bazargan had a spell as prime minister but resigned when he found Khomeini would not let him govern. Those ...”

“... of Mapplethorpe with a whip inserted into his anus is reproduced in evidence) to the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, to the way the exposé of Paul de Man’s early anti-Semitic writings has been used to discredit his literary criticism. These examples sprout sub-examples, often weirdly illustrated with helpful photographs. To bolster the uncontroversial ...”

“... the late Ayatollah Khomeini’s idea of justice and sympathise with his call for the death of Salman Rushdie. Norman Tebbit would doubtless use it for immigrants who fail what he called the cricket test (‘Which side do they cheer for?’). Yet the Israeli-American connection is fraught with particular emotional and political ...”

“... of critical reactions to the Quartet (mostly admiring) and the TV serial (predictably hostile from Salman Rushdie, surprisingly so in one or two other cases). In later years Scott was scathing about his first novel Johnnie Sahib (1952), but its stiff-upper-lip romanticism, competent yet curiously colourless portrayal of military men, and homosexual ...”

“... to fashion, and didacticism has ceased to be considered a grave fault in a writer of fiction. Salman Rushdie has written Haroun, an allegory in the form of a fairy-tale; Emma Tennant also strikes a deliberate nursery note with Sisters and Strangers, with Grandmother Dummer (dumber than a goose?) as narrator and two little girls as her ...”

“... that expanse, but it was to those rooms, with their windows looking down on Tavistock Square, that Salman Rushdie once delivered his review of Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and where it was edited, cared for, ‘washed and ironed’, as the editors would say. ‘Why,’ he wrote, ‘should we bother with Calvino, a word-juggler, a fantasist, in an age in ...”

“... had soured a New Yorker dinner at the Caprice in London by indulging in this ‘exchange’ with Salman Rushdie:     – So you like Beckett’s prose, do you? You like Beckett’s prose.     Having established earlier that he did like Beckett’s prose, Salman neglected to answer.     – Okay. Quote ...”

“... to an international market? What is it to know India only by way of the prizewinning novels of Salman Rushdie and the like? The novelists themselves (Rushdie included) anticipated these questions, and have tried to find ways around the restrictive codes governing their own reproduction as flag-bearers of Third World ...”

“... brusque intrusions of archive footage, or Akomfrah’s moody set pieces contrived in the studio. Salman Rushdie famously said it was ‘no good’. He took against its self-conscious interest in form – its own, and documentary form in general. Where were the lively vox pops in Handsworth Songs that could tell us what was ‘really’ going on and what ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the direction of genre travel is usually the other way round, with established novelists such as Salman Rushdie or Jeanette Winterson trying their hand at work for a younger age group, but it’s hardly a binding rule. In other ways it seems perverse. What can top the experience of capturing a global audience, made up mainly of readers for whom your ...”