Crossing continents | 12 March 2008

Perhaps it’s greed. Or is it greed laced with betrayal? Certainly it’s unseemly. As their careers draw to a close, British authors have developed a habit of stuffing their collected notebooks into a rucksack, hopping to America on Virgin and flogging their life’s jottings to the highest bidder. In 2006 Salman Rushdie accepted an undisclosed sum from Emory University in Atlanta for a collection of papers said to include two unpublished novels and the ‘Fatwa Diaries’ written during his decade on the run from Islamic executioners.