On page 605, Blumenthal says that ‘I made friends with Hitchens’s friends the novelists Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie.’ True in its way. I particularly remember the occasion when he called me up and invited...

To take a side against Rushdie, or to be neutral and evasive about him in the name of some vaguely sensitive ecumenical conscience, is to stand against those who try to incubate a Reformation in...

Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems – but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.

Ravings, in short, jealousy of the past, the worst kind of all.

…what a leveller this remote-control gizmo was…it chopped down the heavyweight and stretched out the slight until all the set’s emissions, commercials, murders, game-shows, the thousand and one varying joys and terrors of the real...

He did not wish to be divine. If there had never been a God, the emperor thought, it might have been easier to work out what goodness was. This business of worship, of the abnegation...