Ask the man in the street to quote a line from one of Salman Rushdie’s novels, and he might struggle. Ask him whether he’s heard the phrase, ‘Naughty but nice’, specifically in the context of cream cakes, and you will probably make his day. It was Salman Rushdie who came up with that slogan in his early career as an adman. Remember the ‘irresistibubble’ tag for Aero chocolate bars? He was responsible for that, too.
‘I feel at bottom that I’m still that boy from Bombay and everything else has been piled on top of that’
If there’s any embarrassment on Rushdie’s part (and why should there be?) that some of his best-known words are from the sides of buses, it was undetectable as he sat down with John Wilson on This Cultural Life last week. Their conversation was especially poignant because it had originally been scheduled to take place the week after Rushdie was stabbed in America in August 2022.
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