This was real stuff.  And the issue of the book then became exacerbated by issues that Salman threw up, I'm sure thinking he was doing the right thing, and who's to say what is right and what is not right in a world that had never encountered anything quite like this before?  And his view was to have Penguin publish the paperback [soon].  Well, we always were going to publish the paperback, but he wanted to be the lead person in deciding when the paperback would be published.

And we, who had battened down the hatches everywhere, we had security against Semtex bombs -   powder coming out of Czechoslovakia which apparently can be detected in an envelope, so everything coming into Penguin offices had to be screened - that was true in the US and UK; many policemen with guard dogs - this going on in all our offices; one of our employees going mentally off the rails.

I'm no hero.  I was as frightened as anybody.  Maybe more frightened, because the fatwa was against Salman Rushdie and his publisher.  And the fatwa is still in force because, as I understand fatwas - and that's not my main area of competence - the only withdrawal of a fatwa can be done by the party who imposed the fatwa.  As Khomeini is dead, the fatwa goes on.

What did happen was, over the years, the government in Tehran disassociated itself from the killing aspects of the fatwa.  And so, that would have meant no more bands of killers, if there ever were any - I don't know.  But they removed their public endorsement of the fatwa.  So the fatwa still exists in an Islamic sense, as I understand it, but not in an Iranian governmental sense.

However, I had letters put into my letter box.  I didn't live like a monk or like a hunted man.  I chose not to.  I was advised by many to live like a hunted man and change my address, change my car, move into a hotel which we did one night - my wife and child and I in New York, when we started getting cackling telephone messages, laughing and saying how we would all be killed.