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Rushdie relives his brush with death

In August 2022, Salman Rushdie was speaking at an event in upstate New York “when a black-clad man ran full-tilt on to the stage, wielding a knife”, says Sarah Lyall in The New York Times. The blade “struck Rushdie 10 times”, badly damaging his left hand and penetrating his right eye “just short of his brain”. After two months in hospital, the author pulled through, and has now released a book about the ordeal, Knife. It contains an imagined dialogue with the attacker, who is on trial for attempted murder, but doesn’t mention him by name. He is instead “my Assailant, my would-be Assassin, the Asinine man who made Assumptions about me, and with whom I had a near-lethal Assignation”.

Today, Rushdie’s left hand “has only partially recovered; his right eye is permanently unusable”. But the 76-year-old’s voice has regained its “rich timbre and air of quick, antic amusement”. More than three decades after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa calling for his death, over supposed blasphemy in his novel The Satanic Verses, Rushdie is still determined “to live life in the open”. “Did you ever see the musical Spamalot?” he asks. “There’s a wheelbarrow of plague victims being wheeled across the stage. And when they get to the middle of the stage they all jump off the wheelbarrow and sing this song, He Is Not Dead Yet. Either you succumb to the fear of death, or you don’t.”

🔪📈 Before the attack, Rushdie’s career was on the slide: his books were panned, and he was mocked for being a Manhattan party animal. But the stabbing generated a critical and commercial “sympathy wave”, he told The New Yorker last year. “Now that I’ve almost died, everybody loves me. That was my mistake, back then. Not only did I live but I tried to live well. Bad mistake. Get 15 stab wounds, much better.”

📚 To read about the book that made Rushdie’s name, click here.

Where Macron went wrong

For years, says Michael Sauga in Der Spiegel, Emmanuel Macron seemed to provide the “answer to the populist challenge”. When he “stormed into the Elysée Palace” seven years ago, the French president argued that the way to keep extremists in check was to do away with the traditional balance between mainstream right-wing and left-wing parties, and instead establish “broad, largely ideology-free movements in the political centre”. Now that plan “is in ruins”. In France, the political fringes have become stronger rather than weaker. His party is more than 10 points behind Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally in the polls, and is set to be trounced in June’s European elections.

Macron’s centrism has failed on policy, too. He committed to “sound budgeting” on taking office, but France’s current budget deficit stands at a whopping 5.5% of GDP. On immigration, he lurched so far to the right that many on the left deserted him. On the environment, he lurched so far to the left that France’s farmers came out en masse to protest. Elsewhere in Europe, “the traditional forces that Macron saw as doomed have consolidated”: socialists and right-wing Christian Democrats are both on the up. Ultimately, a democracy needs not only a democratic government, but also a democratic opposition. Voters who can only choose “between populism and non-populism” have no real choice at all. “It is not impossible that the citizens to whom Macron constantly shouts ‘me or chaos’ will at some point choose chaos.”

“Molto sexy, molto animal print and molto, molto Italiano”

Roberto Cavalli’s signature style is best summed up by an old description in The Independent, says The New York Times: “molto sexy, molto animal print and molto, molto Italiano”. Before the fashion designer died last week aged 83, the so-called “king of bling” led a lifestyle as maximalist as his clothes. He piloted an iridescent helicopter the colour of an aubergine; “sailed the Mediterranean in a matching purple yacht”; and travelled the world on a Ducati motorbike customised with a diamanté-encrusted speedometer and a wolf’s pelt saddle. He owned vineyards, a chocolate factory and a menagerie of exotic animals, including a monkey who kept him company when watching television, and, fleetingly, a tiger.

Born to an Italian dressmaker in 1940, Cavalli was the “teenage tearaway of European fashion” for more than half a century, says The Times. He whipped up “plunging dresses and slashed skirts”, adopting the ethos that “shorter, brighter and tighter was always better”. When his first Saint-Tropez boutique opened in 1972, he sold “pink leather evening dresses” to the likes of Brigitte Bardot and Sophia Loren. By the mid-1990s, he was one of the biggest names in fashion. He designed the crystal-and-lamé outfits for a Spice Girls comeback tour; revamped the Playboy bunny costume, and released Cavalli vodka in a snake-print holder. When public tastes swung “towards minimalism”, he refused to go the same way, adamant that fashion should be an adventure. “It should be something that in the morning, when you open your window, you say: ‘Fantastic – sun!’”