REVIEWING SALMAN Rushdie’s Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder in last month’s Literary Review, the Rev. Fergus Butler-Gallie struck what to most observers of the modern literary scene will seem a rather familiar note. The quality that distinguished Rushdie’s memoir, he alleged, was “its slight twilight-of-the-gods feel”.
During the months of its composition, a clutch of high-profile contemporaries had been struck down: Bill Buford of and fame had suffered a heart attack, Hanif Kureishi was felled by paralysis and Martin Amis was dead. According
