Salman Rushdie's Imaginary Homelands is an important record of one writer's intellectual and personal odyssey. The 70 essays collected here, written over the last 10 years, cover an astonishing range of subjects - the literature of the received masters and of Rushdie's contemporaries; the politics of colonialism and the ironies of culture; film, politicians, the Labour Party; religious fundamentalism in America; racial prejudice; and the preciousness of the imagination and of free expression.