This chapter explores Rushdie's conception of the relationship between art and politics. It turns to three essays written by Rushdie in the early 1980s, at the juncture of his career when he was starting to define his public role as a novelist after the successes of Midnight's Children and Shame. These essays, which might, with a degree of critical licence, be seen to amount to a manifesto of his views on the political functions of art, are ‘Imaginary Homelands’ (1982), ‘Outside the Whale’ (1984) and ‘The Location of Brazil’ (1985). Arguably the most revealing of all these is ‘Outside the Whale’, written in partial response to George Orwell's 1940 essay, ‘Inside the Whale’, in which it is suggested that writers, rather than engaging directly in politics, should climb inside a metaphorical whale where, with ‘yards of blubber between [themselves] and reality’, they will be ‘able to keep up an attitude of the completest indifference’ to the world.

This chapter aims to explore some of the inner dynamics of French and English Catholic literary revivals in ways that cast more light on the confrontation between secularisation and resistance to it. One possible objection to the critics of secularisation is that the indices of religiosity in society show that secularisation has not occurred, or that it is at the least mitigated. This study provides an analysis of secularisation in which the model of the buffered individual poses two problems for religion when it is considered corporately. The first is that the buffered individual's mind-centred view of reality tends to undermine confidence in a commonly received meaning and purpose in the cosmos. The second is that the buffered individual's capacity for disengagement from this community of knowledge reinforces the model of radical individual autonomy, which Cavanaugh identifies as the basis on which secular politics is constructed.

Monica Pearl discusses the pleasures of opera, exploring through her own long immersion as an aficionado a new poetics through which we might understand the experience of bliss which is peculiar to this art form. Here language is somehow not enough, or not adequate. And yet, of course, we must employ language to talk about this intense experience. Questions of gender and sexuality come into play in this encounter, though not necessarily in the ways other writers have suggested. Richard Strauss’ The Rosenkavalier offers the opportunity for sustained reflection on how the bliss of opera works.

Mary Cappello's essay explores what actually goes on in bodily encounters between two people – in this case between people who are not otherwise intimate. The occasion of a massage session evokes a range of feelings and leads to a sequence of reflections on touch, talk and writing itself. The question of the gender, and the sexual orientation, of massage therapist and subject/author come into play in complex, if unspoken ways, and the links and contrasts of intellectual labour and manual work emerge as inevitable aspects of this encounter.

This chapter discusses the novel The Satanic Verses. Like Midnight's Children and Shame before it, The Satanic Verses is a strongly satirical text that takes, as one of its dominant socio-political agendas, the condemnation of the abuse of power and authority. Unlike the two earlier novels, however, The Verses shifts its attention away from the abuses committed by South Asian political leaders towards the abuses that flourished under Margaret Thatcher's Prime Ministerial watch in 1980s Britain. Specifically, the novel, in its dominant narrative line, sets out to explore (or expose) the impact upon Britain's minority communities of lingering Falklands-era jingoism, and of systematic, institutionalised racism in organisations such as the police force and the media.

Margaret Beetham, in a fragment of a memoir written ‘otherwise’ (namely in the third person), creates a collage of memory about growing up in India, moving back and forth between her childhood self and the present moment. The child of missionaries, she finds many of her memories and present-day reflections formulated in the language of fragments from the Bible, while recreating an affectionate family scene far removed from strictness and orthodoxy. The clearly-recalled moments – of travel in India, of the loneliness of boarding school, of food, heat, conversation – remain present in many ways in her contemporary present life in England.

This chapter attempts to synthesise some of the most common accounts of the history of secularisation in France and England during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It provides an understanding of the nature of individual and societal secularisation in England and France, and assesses, in spite of the vast differences, what correlations can be drawn between the two countries. The study of the secularisation of mentalities examines the pluralisation of worldviews, which came about through individualism and technological consciousness. Trends in secular thinking revolutionised comprehension of the world, affected the dominant religious traditions and multiplied the alternative accounts of human destiny. It addresses the secularisation of societal activities and institutions that examine the ways in which English and French society moved away from their erstwhile religious dispensation. The chapter aims to identify the shifting patterns of secular thought and organisation that prevailed in spite of religious revivalism.

This chapter sheds light on the paradox of French Catholic literary resistance to secularisation in the period 1880–1914, and on its coincidental parallels among English Catholic writers of the same period. The chapter explores individual secularisation and draws on Charles Taylor's analysis of the immanent frame in which the ‘closed’ or buffered individual treats knowledge as a mind-centred process, meaning as a mind-originated product, and purpose and choice as autonomous or self-directed pursuits. The tendency of Catholic writers to draw on this anti-Enlightenment tradition is even more acute in political matters. Their understanding and portrayal of the Church's capacity to gather its members in a hierarchical fashion correlate strongly with their search for a renewed religious porosity or shared meaning and purpose.

Jackie Stacey's essay on the idea of being ‘open to difference’ is a discussion of her experiences of two very different groups: an academic centre for the study of cosmopolitan cultures and an introductory course on group psychotherapy. Exploring ideas about being open to the differences other people represent, she shows how the complex interactions played out in the groupwork course offer important insights for rethinking cosmopolitan aspirations.