couple of nights before he was almost killed by a stranger with a knife, Salman Rushdie dreamed about being attacked by a Roman gladiator with a spear. He’d had similar dreams ever since Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa after publication of The Satanic Verses, in 1989, imagining “my assassin rising up in some public forum or other and coming for me”. When on the morning of 12 August 2022, in Chautauqua in upstate New York, on stage to talk about the importance of and his second was “?”
