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“... and the punitive libel suit. She has every right to be. One of the many obnoxious aspects of the Salman Rushdie affair is the complacent assumption that we Britons – those of us with white faces, that is – would never be so barbarous about a mere novel, whichever of our sacred cows it attacked. But I can imagine a combination of elements which would ...”

“... a lowering of energy. In The Blasphemers’ Banquet (1989), a BBC film about the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, lines like Omar Khayyam, the poet of Iran whose quatrain I’m using here, as best I can, will pour for us his choicest flask of wine while I pass round the Peshawari nan. are followed by the very different The thorny whys and ...”

“... Bernard-Henri Lévy, and signed by Paul Auster, Milan Kundera, William Shawcross, Claude Lanzmann, Salman Rushdie, Mike Nichols, Neil Jordan, and, to bring up the female numbers, Diane von Furstenberg, the Isabelles Adjani and Huppert, Yamani Benguigui, Danièle Thompson and Arielle Dombasle. It reads: Apprehended like a common terrorist Saturday ...”

“... been in the past at once inimitable (there were a few dreadful efforts) and hugely influential: Salman Rushdie, in his introduction to this collection of lectures and speeches, says that The Tin Drum was one of six works which gave him the ‘passport’ to become the sort of writer he had it in himself to be. But ‘influence on the younger generation ...”

“... visible – as it has been throughout the century. To take an obvious contemporary example, Salman Rushdie can scarcely be called a lowbrow novelist, yet in all his work the lowbrow is insistently present; The Wizard of Oz (the film) is as important an influence as Don Quixote. In The Ground beneath Her Feet, popular songs are more than just ...”

“... Any resemblance to real snark, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Franzen goes on to spank Salman Rushdie (for joining Twitter); n+1, ‘a politically committed print magazine that I respect’ (for praising the internet while not addressing its impoverishment of writers); and the liberal professoriat (for savaging capitalism in contemporary ...”

“... by notoriety from the literary to the political plane and sequestered from the actual world – Salman Rushdie springs to mind – the effects on his style and compositional methods are hardly felicitous. One image, at once portentous and silly, suffices to demonstrate: apropos of the Mexican-American border strip, Saviano writes: ‘That long tongue ...”

“... a doctorate at Princeton for a dissertation on the ‘Satanic Verses’ – the idea (explored by Salman Rushdie) that the devil inserted phrases into the Quran praising female deities, which were subsequently redacted from the holy text. The story of the Satanic Verses, Ahmed found from his study of sources drawn from manuscript libraries all over the ...”

“... 7 November 1989, after the publication of The Satanic Verses, Greene wrote to R.K. Narayan about Salman Rushdie: ‘He has just done a very charming review of my book of letters and I have met him briefly at a lunch party, but I have never read any of his books, so I wouldn’t be able to say whether he had gone out of his way to provoke ...”

“... it will last, whether one will want to read it again, are more difficult questions to answer. Salman Rushdie described The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, which appeared in English in 1980, as ‘a whirling dance of a book’, and went on to bury it under all the chic epithets, sad, obscene, tender, wickedly funny, wonderfully wise, ‘a masterpiece ...”

“... careers trying to emulate Barthelme but soon gave up. ‘He makes you think you can do it,’ Salman Rushdie confided in 2011, ‘and actually you can’t do it.’Barthelme himself grew up reading and imitating his favourite New Yorker writers, which is one reason he slotted so well into its pages. His heroes were the great humourists of the ...”

“... McCartney, John Lennon, Robbie Williams, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, Evelyn Waugh, Auberon Waugh, Salman Rushdie, Jeffrey Archer, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, William Shakespeare (although to be fair they despise the comedies and some of the history plays only). ‘It is easier, in fact,’ notes Katie, ‘to write down the people in world history that ...”

“... Many poets and writers are in the exhibition: William Empson, Seamus Heaney, Charles Tomlinson, Salman Rushdie, Robert Lowell, Geoffrey Hill. The only other bare feet besides Walcott’s belong to a corpse on a dissecting table in front of Keith Simpson, the forensic pathologist. An illegible name-tag is attached to a big toe. St Lucia may not be the ...”

“... In the next chapter, Parks returns to the question of the Booker Prize he should have won. Even Salman Rushdie thought so: ‘He frowned and said if it was him he would be furious; he would be throwing chairs round and complaining.’ But the fix was in for Arundhati Roy: ‘The book was charming, it was already a bestseller, it was from India, it was ...”

“... Smith was the epigone of ‘hysterical realism’, the misbegotten progeny of Thomas Pynchon and Salman Rushdie. When he repeated the charge in the Guardian after the 11 September attacks, she responded that the term was ‘painfully accurate’, and mounted a defence of David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo, as if the prescriptive Englishman posed the ...”