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In 1988, amid mounting hysteria about the spread of HIV, Thatcher’s Tory government passed a bill banning local councils and schools from “promoting homosexuality.” Meanwhile, councils were forbidden from stocking libraries with literature or films that contained gay or lesbian themes. The Swimming-Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst (1988) The Japanese translator of the novel was assassinated.Īs the author Hanif Kureishi wrote in 2012, “ is one of the most significant events in postwar literary history it reminded us that words can be dynamite and that in other parts of the world … writers who spoke freely could be in great danger.” Books were burned, and bookshops firebombed.
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Rushdie spent the next decade in hiding, shadowed by round-the-clock bodyguards. Trouble was, its depiction of the prophet Mohammad sparked outrage across part of the Muslim world, moving Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, to issue a fatwa against Rushdie, and a $6 million reward for his life. It's surreal, ironic, intense and brilliant. The price for their salvation? They have been chosen by a higher power as opponents in the battle between good and evil. It's almost a shame that this book is better remembered for igniting a global controversy than for its story, because it's a brilliantly imaginative tour de force about two men who are thrown from a bombed plane only to be washed up, alive, in England. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie (1988) And, as usual, there were plenty of writers itching to make sense of it all. Nor the AIDS crisis and the rampant, structural homophobia that it spawned.Ī lot happened in the 1980s: a decade of massive social, political and cultural change the influence of which has dripped through every decade since. History has not forgotten Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev or Michael Jackson, either. How could anyone forget Top Gun, The Smiths, Dallas, MTV, yuppies, powersuits, IBM and Rubik's Cubes? It was the decade Millenials were born, just as Mr. There was a Very Important war over an island somewhere near Argentina, and a pop concert to relieve a famine in Africa. The decade Diana became a princess, Prince Rogers Nelson became just Prince greed got good (for a while) and poverty got worse. It was the decade 24-hour news was born and the Cold War died. surely the most photogenic decade in history. Hold your boombox in the air for the 1980s.