Joan Smith
Banned, on the Run
Towards the end of Salman Rushdie’s memoir, we see the author at lunch in the Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles with Christopher Hitchens and Warren Beatty. The movie star reveals that he has recently seen Rushdie with his girlfriend, Padma Lakshmi, whom he declares to be ‘so beautiful that it made me want to faint’. Rushdie suggests calling Lakshmi to tell her this exciting news and Beatty asks him to pass on a message: ‘Will you please tell her … that Warren Beatty is here and he thought she was so beautiful that it made him want to faint.’ Rushdie obliges: ‘I’m having lunch with Warren Beatty … and he says to tell you that he thinks you’re so beautiful that it makes him want to faint.’ Lakshmi agrees to join them and turns up ‘looking, of course, as if she might make Warren Beatty faint’.
Have we all got the point? Rushdie knows some very famous people, something he’s made clear more than once by the time this anecdote appears on page 615 of his doorstop of a book. (Joseph Anton, by the way, is the pseudonym he adopted during his
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553
'The authors do not shrink from spelling out the scale of the killings when the Rhodesians made long-distance raids on guerrilla camps in Mozambique and Zambia.'
Xan Smiley on how Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/what-the-secret-agent-saw