The centrepiece of Salman Rushdie’s new memoir is a vivid but harrowing account of the recent savage knife attack that almost ended his life.

In painful detail, he writes how he was stabbed multiple times during an event in New York State in 2022, slumping to the floor of the stage as the frenzy of blows continued before, finally, some brave members of the audience overpowered his assailant.

Against the odds, Rushdie recovered from the assault. Although he lost his sight in one eye and the partial use of one hand, his gifts as a writer have been undiminished. ...

As Winston Churchill — who had a shrewd understanding of Islam from his Victorian days as a soldier in India and Sudan, once wrote – an ‘appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last’.

Sadly, the valour of Churchill and Rushdie has been absent all too often in the West. Denial and delusion have been our watchwords. Capitulation has been dressed up as ‘social inclusion’.

The pathetic impulse to appease has allowed Muslim extremism to flourish in our midst, reflected in the long catalogue of terror incidents, the surge in anti-Semitism across Western Europe, the development of separate communities complete with strict dress code and informal sharia tribunals, the dominance of hardline preachers in mosques, the networks of madrassa schools that promote a quasi-medieval interpretation of Islam, the tacit acceptance by officialdom of arranged marriages and polygamy, and the introduction of de facto blasphemy laws in the name of tackling ‘hate speech’.  ...

While hundreds of thousands of brave women in Iran protest against the Islamic head-covering, in Labour-run Sandwell in the West Midlands a huge, brutalist sculpture has gone up of a Muslim woman in traditional dress. ‘The strength of the hijab’ is the title of this piece of theocratic propaganda which should have no place in Britain.

Rushdie himself said recently: ‘We live in a moment, I think, at which freedom of expression and freedom to publish has not in my lifetime been under such threat in the countries of the West.’

He is right. It is a profoundly depressing thought that no mainstream publisher would touch The Satanic Verses today.