Memoir
Salman Rushdie is resilient and erudite after attack. Photo: Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Two nights before Salman Rushdie was to give a talk at the Chautauqua Institution, a non-profit education centre in western New York, in the summer of 2022, he had a nightmare in which he was attacked in a Roman amphitheatre by a gladiator with a spear.
His wife, the poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths, woke and reassured him. Despite his wife’s reassurances, Rushdie did not want to go to the festival to speak – and yet there were bills to pay.