REMEMBER Joseph Anton? Perhaps not, but you’ll remember the event surrounding him. Mr Anton was the alias adopted by author Salman Rushdie in 1989 after Muslim extremists declared a fatwa – effectively a death sentence – on him in response to his novel The Satanic Verses, which was deemed blasphemous.
BOOK OF THE WEEK
Mon-Fri Radio 4, 9:45am
START THE WEEK
Monday, 9am
RED FILE FOR CALLAN
Monday, Radio 4 Extra, 8:30pm
WORDS AND MUSIC
Tomorrow, Radio 3, 6:30pm
The threat forced Rushdie to live under police protection for a decade, flitting between safe houses and fearing for both his own life and that of his young son.
Thus, Rushdie’s latest memoir, newly published, is titled Joseph Anton and it is Radio 4’s BOOK OF THE WEEK, starting on Monday. Read by Zubin Varla, the book concentrates on the author’s childhood and formative years, leading on to his work in advertising. then massive literary success.
To mark the book’s publication, Rushdie is also Andrew Marr’s guest on START THE WEEK, talking about his life in hiding from the threat of extremist attack, and how he gradually became more free – although the fatwa has never been fully rescinded.
In the realm of the fictional secret agent, families are rarely an encumbrance; certainly not in the shadowy world of Callan, the coolly efficient hitman, and his faithful and odiferous sidekick, Lonely. Originally published in 1969, James Mitchell’s novel A Magnum for Schneider has been adapted for Radio 4 Extra as RED FILE FOR CALLAN, with Ben Miles reading the tale of how Callan, now washed up and working as a bookkeeper, is re-engaged by his old intelligence bosses to target the suspect German businessman who, it turns out, works in an office directly opposite the under-employed former agent.
On a lighter note, the fine art of idling is celebrated in WORDS AND MUSIC, its weekly blend of music, poetry and prose featuring the suitably languorous thoughts of such practised aficionados as Jerome K Jerome, John Keats and Kenneth Grahame, as well as music from such diverse sympathetic spirits as Claude Debussy, Hoagy Carmichael and the Kinks. This programme has been broadcast previously but, when it comes to idling, I can never get enough of it.