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“... In 1989, he declined an invitation to sign the Society of Authors’ letter declaring support for Salman Rushdie after the fatwa was declared. By this time he seems to have become open to arguments for censorship. The last essay in this volume argued that the power of television must be controlled and violent images restricted. Only then could a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”