Hello and welcome to the Spectators Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor for The Spectator.

And this week, I'm sorry to say I'm on holiday. So we're going to take this opportunity to repost this conversation I had with Sir Salman Rushdie just before the COVID pandemic.

We talked about Kishot and the State of America.

Thank you. pandemic. We talked about Kishot and the State of America. I always get at least one, a really savage review saying that my literary talent was in free fall, things like that.

Anyway, but...

Anyway, but on the whole...

It's not James Wood settling school again.

No, it wasn't James, no.

No, I mean, Martin Amos has this nice phrase where he says,

when you publish a book, he says,

you either get away with it or you don't get away with it.

No, I think he's also, he came out, that lovely line that said all a writer Ray wants to read

his 20,000 words of closely argued praise.

Anyway, so it was all right, it was a good publication.

But Kishat is a good place to start, if I can.

I mean, you write in the book or one of the many sort of narrators or writer figures, writes the book, that we're living in the age of anything can happen.

Yeah. And can I ask you what did you mean by that particularly? I mean, what I meant is that things that would be, would have seemed utterly improbable, now happen on a daily basis.

I mean, I remember, actually, Ian McKeon was over here. We had, we had dinner together,

and we said to each other that if we had presented to our publishers the plot of the last

three or four years, they would have said, go away and think of something more plausible.

And actually, the implausible has now become every day.

Is that a sort of challenge to somebody who works in a tradition where kind of crazy stuff

...