I was reading a Salman Rushdie column the other day and, not for the first time, agreeing with ninety-five percent of it. In fact, I agree with him so often these days I’ve almost stopped noticing it. But not quite: far away at the back of my mind, I still remember the Rushdie of the 1980s—reflexively leftist, anti-Thatcher, the works. The old line about the liberal mugged by reality goes tenfold for him: he’s a liberal whom reality has spent the last thirteen years trying to kill. I still have difficulties with his novels, not least the one that got him into all the trouble, but in his columns and essays at least he has no illusions.

I wonder, though, how he feels about his chums, the old comrades from the BBC arts shows and left-wing salons. Comparatively few liberals get mugged by reality, and among the grand panjandrums of the arts it’s rarer still. At the theater, indeed, one often feels mugged by unreality, by strang ...

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