This book [Cronopios and Famas] is a golden nettle. Those who poke at it gingerly and are stung will still bring away tiny splinters of pure gold.

The theme of The Satanic Verses is migration, emigration, and the loss of faith it often brings about in the emigrant/immigrant. Faith, its loss, and the relation of faith to the secular life, the hole — the “God shaped hole” — at the centre of the once-faithful person, is the issue that, Rushdie has admitted, underpins the book.

You couldn't see it at the time, but Joyce was a highly skilled technician, tinkering around with a book-machine, making it do things it had never done before. His contemporaries saw him as an artist (or a pornographer, depending on who you talked to), but from our vantage point, he could just as easily be a programmer, writing code for the printing press platform. Joyce wrote software for hardware originally conjured up by Gutenberg.