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“... Azhar’s mother​ led him to the front of the lower deck, sat him down with his satchel, hurried back to the bus stop to retrieve her shopping, and took her place beside him. As the bus pulled away Azhar spotted Big Billy and his son Little Billy racing alongside, yelling and waving at the driver. Azhar closed his eyes and hoped it was moving too rapidly for them to get on ...”

“... One day, when my father came home from work, he put his briefcase away behind the door and stripped to his vest and pants in the front room. He spread the pink towel with the rip in it on the floor. He got onto his knees – and he was by no means a flexible man – placed his arms beside his head, and kicked himself into the air. ‘I must practise,’ he said ...”

“... the inexplicable power of the right sound in the right place at the right time. Jon Savage and Hanif Kureishi have gathered more than a hundred and fifty pieces extracted from punk fanzines, key texts of pop history (such as Peter Guralnick’s Sweet Soul Music and Ice T’s autobiography) and the weekly music press, as well as from more outré ...”

“... Hanif Kureishi got me beaten up. Admittedly it was by my dad. At home, as at the factory where for more than half of his life he had been a semi-skilled machine operator, he preferred to communicate with his hands. Yet as his fists whacked into my face I thought, then as now, how right he was to do what he was doing ...”

“... Hanif Kureishi’s father, like many fathers, hated his job (he was a clerk at the Pakistani Embassy in London). But unlike many fathers, he tried in his spare time to forge for himself an alternative, fulfilling career as a writer. He was proud, humiliated, persistent. He wrote at least four novels, all of which were turned down by publishers and agents ...”

“... going to elope? I feel very insecure. Before I went to America, Jill spent all her time promoting Hanif Kureishi and that Black Album of his. My editor kept saying: ‘Don’t ring Jill, she’s busy.’ Eventually, I told him sourly that Hanif Kureishi didn’t need promoting; it’s we new authors who need ...”

“... The ‘beautiful laundrette’ that provides the title for Hanif Kureishi’s first film catches the flavour of his very personal brand of humour – off beat, off-the-wall with a cynical twist. Indian teenager Omar, working for his uncle while he waits to go to college, takes over a dingy, run-down laundrette, and tarts it up – with orange walls, fish tanks, hanging ferns, muzak and a glittering, picture-palace neon sign – till it’s ‘a ritz among laundrettes ...”

“... In doing so, it is as if we find ourselves actually present in the room with Emma and Harriet. Hanif Kureishi’s Something to Tell You, a novel which suffers badly from feeling obliged to include too much, nonetheless achieves some of its best effects through what it leaves out. There are two scenes in particular where the reader is drawn to identify ...”

“... vision of London. He finds it realised in the 1987 film Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, scripted by Hanif Kureishi, especially the ‘extraordinary scene’ in which the screen is divided and three attractive couples ‘are all shown fucking’. Here is cinematic confirmation of the city as a place of unpredictable pairings and joyful ...”

“... who would happily settle for a regular 12 grand. Writers with film and mass-media connections – Hanif Kureishi, for example – don ‘t of course tell us what they earn. And since the survey confines itself to so-called serious writers, there are no Jeffrey Archers to cheapen the proceedings. The £20,000 p.a. average is in line with the results of a ...”

“... friend Marty’. I had known nothing of the 18th century or indeed of Pakistanis, but Hanif Kureishi had said: ‘Don’t worry – they’re exactly like you.’ Donnie Brasco is about an undercover agent who infiltrated the Mob, became alienated from his family and the Bureau, and came to realise that moral duty involved human betrayal (the ...”

“... in Bradford. It’s a city whose mystery Selbourne misses because he doesn’t see what Hanif Kureishi went looking for, according to a piece of his in Granta: ‘Bradford seemed to be a microcosm of a larger British society that was struggling to find a sense of itself even as it was undergoing radical change.’ Writers aren’t just ...”

“... in France this artsy, edgy quality, whose English equivalent is so well loved by J.G. Ballard and Hanif Kureishi, is rapidly giving way to a vision of despair, incivility and lawlessness on housing estates. Sarkozy needs to point these elements up in order to strengthen his appeal, but a man who needs the banlieues, where so many of France’s Muslims ...”

“... television have begun to reflect a human diversity, as have a trickle of novels and autobiography (Hanif Kureishi, Farook Dhondy’s patronage at Channel 4, Praful Mohanti’s Through Brown Eyes). But in newspapers and non-fiction books ‘black’ Britons continue to emerge as one-dimensional categories which have to be worried about, feared or assisted ...”

“... others,3 and it is also an operative assumption of the controversial films of Stephen Frears and Hanif Kureishi and of Steve Bell’s Maggie’s Farm cartoons. It may be that an unlivable and impoverished public sphere – where the buses are all but non-existent and far too expensive, where the inner city is a ‘no-go’ area (especially for ...”