When the Queen made Hanif Kureishi a Commander of the British Empire in 2008, she gave him a medal embossed with the logo: "For God and Empire." "You can't get better than that," the writer quipped at the time. "The only causes are the lost causes or the nonexistent ones."
But God and Empire and the shadows they have cast over Britain have been very good to Kureishi, providing him with two rich seams of material for his fiction. "When I was a kid, people were always talking about the death of the novel," he...
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