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If terrorism is to be defeated, the world of Islam must take on board the secularist-humanist principles on which the modern is based, and without whi...more

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When 'Midnight's Children' came out, people in the West tended to respond to the fantasy elements in the novel, to praise it in those terms. In India,...more

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A book is not completed till it's read.

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..now, seated hunched over paper in a pool of Anglepoised light, I no longer want to be anything except what who I am. Who what am I? My answer: I am ...more

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The question I'm always asking myself is: are we masters or victims? Do we make history, or does history make us? Do we shape the world, or are we jus...more

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In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss.

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A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.

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When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certa...more

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Did you know, ji,’ Zulu offered, ‘that the map of Tolkien’s Middle earth fits quite well over central England and Wales? Maybe all fairylands are righ...more

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Tai tapped his left nostril. 'You know what this is, Nakkoo? It's the place where the outside world meets the world inside you.

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For a long while I have believed – this is perhaps my version of Sir Darius Xerxes Cama’s belief in a fourth function of outsideness – that in every g...more

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A book is a product of a pact with the Devil that inverts the Faustian contract, he'd told Allie. Dr Faustus sacrificed eternity in return for two doz...more