Birmingham.

Being an actor, I find it easy to switch.

One minute, I am an impulsive detective.

Then...

A ferocious tiger.

Here comes advertising address.

Nothing's easier than switching to SkyMobile.

Escape to SkyMobile and get six months half price on selected plans.

Sky, believe in better. Ends 21st of January. Plans from £5 for 3

gigabytes, excludes 100 megabytes, 25 gigabytes and unlimited. 12 month minimum term. Prices may vary. See sky.com

forward slash mobile. This is a global original podcast.

Hello and welcome to Full Discoja, a podcast project designed chiefly to allow me to spend more time than is normally available in an interview format with people that I find fascinating,

although this week I am both daunted by the scale of the subject matter that we could cover and uncharacteristically intimidated by the interviewees.

Sir Salman Rushdie, many thanks indeed for doing this.

Thank you. I'm really not scary.

Well, I have to be the judge of fact.

I'm encouraged by the fact that you describe your most deplorable

trait or the trait you most deplore about yourself as talkativeness. As an interviewer, I'm

encouraged by that. For an interview that often runs through the life and times before we arrive

on the most recent work, I'm discouraged by the fact that you find yourself increasingly drawn

to the sort of 18th century novelists model of not really wanting to reveal much about yourself.

So where's the tension there between the reticence and the talkativeness?

...