The Boyhood of Raleigh the then Conservative leader William Hague as a small boy (this was common in satire at the time, as Hague had first attained national fame as a teenager in the 1970s), while two old sailors – former Foreign Secretary David Owen and former Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey – gestured inland and away from a ship labelled "Euro". The two elder statesmen described themselves as pro-European but opposed to British membership of the Single Currency. The picture has also appeared in recent explorations of postcolonialism, most notably Salman Rushdie's novel "Midnight's Children", in which the narrator Saleem Sinai partly
Salman Rushdie 2005 novel "Shalimar the Clown" received, in India, the prestigious Hutch Crossword Book Award, and was, in the UK, a finalist for the Whitbread Book Awards. It was shortlisted for the 2007 International Dublin Literary Award. In his 2002 non-fiction collection "Step Across This Line", he professes his admiration for the Italian writer Italo Calvino and the American writer Thomas Pynchon, among others. His early influences included Jorge Luis Borges, Mikhail Bulgakov, Lewis Carroll, Günter Grass, and James Joyce. Rushdie was a personal friend of Angela Carter's and praised her highly in the foreword of her collection "Burning your Boats".