Monday, August 04, 2008

The bodyguard's last sigh

Thought it had got a bit quiet on the embattled author front...

I do wonder whether Salman Rushdie sometimes wishes that books had never been invented. They have provided his fame and fortune; but they've also given him more than his share of grief.

The latest tome to unsettle the literary knight is On Her Majesty's Service, the work of Roy Evans, one of the special branch officers who protected the author after Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa in response to The Satanic Verses. According to Evans, Rushdie (or "Scruffy" as they dubbed him) so exasperated his guards that they shut him in a cupboard while they went to the pub...


More smoked Salman here

2 comments:

amyonymous said...

do Brits actively hate Rushdie? Are they jealous? The few comments you got seem to imply this. Of course, I'm a Rushdie fan (not of him, but of his books, I don't really care what he is like).

man, Rushdie and Coldplay - the Brits can be damn unforgiving.

and we americans are so fair and kind......

Tim F said...

Because of the fatwa, Amy, a lot of people know Rushdie more than they know his work. (More than would be the case with Amis, Barnes, McEwan, etc.) He's a kind of representative Hampstead luvvie intellectual, which doesn't make him popular to the average Joe in the street. Add the fact that he's not Anglo-Saxon, and he becomes something of a whipping boy in certain quarters.