The savage and near fatal knife attack on Salman Rushdie on 12^th August in quiet upstate New York shocked many. It echoed through the global community of writers and readers and well beyond. Rushdie had been about to speak when naked violence plunged into a literary event. It charged brutally into the world of words, thought and imaginative expression. These are more usually spaces of reflection in which violence is parsed, questioned, perhaps mocked, deflected, understood.

 The front-page pictures in the UK’s Saturday papers said it all. An inflatable blimp of the prime minister, some three metres high and with thumb turned up in a characteristic gesture of optimism, soared above a smiling Johnson himself in the now Conservative north-eastern town of Hartlepool along a shoreline where the ship-building industry had once thrived and where the Labour Party had reigned supreme since 1964.