Know Your Enemy

"The thing that disappointed me most about Updike is that he did not say in that review that he had just completed a novel about terrorism. He had to sweep me out of the way in order to make room for himself. I don't subscribe to the very predominantly English admiration of Updike. If you take away 'Rabbit Is Rich' and 'Rabbit At Rest', and some of the short stories, there's a lot of ... slightly ... garbage. Think of 'The Coup'! The new one ['Terrorist'] is beyond awful. He should stay in his parochial neighbourhood and write about wife-swapping, because it's what he can do."

Judging by this comment (taken from the interview in Saturday's Guardian), Salman Rushdie is still seething about the reception John Updike afforded his last novel 'Shalimar The Clown' in the New Yorker last year.

Interviewer James Campbell's throwaway comment that "After Cambridge, [Rushdie] worked in London at a firm of advertising copywriters" reminds me of a coincidental conversation I had on Saturday night. Did you know that Rushdie was behind the 1980s "Naughty but nice" slogan for cream cakes?