″I don’t really want to go back to fact,” Salman Rushdie said in a Paris Review interview in 2005. “I want to do less and less of it.” At the time he had published more than 150 essays and reviews in a pair of superb collections, Imaginary Homelands (1991) and Step Across This Line (2002), as well as documentary scripts, a British Film Institute booklet on The Wizard of Oz and an eye-witness account of the Contra War, The Jaguar Smile (1987).

Now, he explained, he wanted to devote himself to “the business of imaginative writing”. He had just completed his tenth novel, Shalimar the Clown, and over the subsequent decade and a half, he produced a fairy tale, a fantasia about Renaissance Italy and the Mughal empire, and topical reworkings of the Arabian Nights, Apuleius’s The Golden Ass and Don Quixote.

New Statesman