Any chance of him paying back all the money spent on protecting him?
As much chance, as Andrew Marr pointed out, as Pakistan returning the aid increase we gave them last year.
Heh. True. Twas but a cheap shot and not really meant anyway.
Btw, my problem with Rushdie isn't the Satantic Verses (or all the money spent on him) as such, but the fact that all his books post-Midnight's Children have been little more than self-regarding dross, of the sort that is much too common in modern literature.
Midnight's Children is, obviously, a masterpiece, but some of the rest isn't bad either. Actually, I like Satanic Verses a lot - it would have been a really great book, had it been somewhat shorter: in my extremely humble opinion, he didn't know how and when to finish (and, frankly, had he dropped the "Khomeini" line, the book wouldn't have lost much, if anything, and the author might have been spared the Great Man's attention
)
