The Satanic Verses is a book “with a very bloody trail”, says Bari Weiss in Common Sense. After Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini offered a bounty, eventually raised to $3.3m, for Salman Rushdie’s murder, the author spent years in hiding. The book’s Japanese translator was stabbed to death; the Norwegian publisher was shot and critically injured. So why in 2015, when the chaos had subsided and “you might run into Rushdie at Manhattan cocktail parties”, did the writer say it was “the darkest time” he’d experienced? Because by then we had betrayed the “ferocious commitment” to free speech that had saved his life. If The Satanic Verses was published today, Rushdie would be condemned for “insulting an ethnic and cultural minority”.

Inflation is surging, energy bills are soaring, and A&E departments are on their knees. “Wherever you look,” says Robert Colvile in The Sunday Times, “the headlines blare one simple message: Britain is broken.” Of course, many things are “very far from OK”. But the UK is not, as gloomy analysts at one investment bank claim, becoming “an emerging market country”. Since the 2008 crash, our economy has grown quicker than the euro area. The current crisis is hitting the continent just as badly, if not worse, because the reasons for our collective woes are the same: economic fallout from Covid and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.