In his new novel, Something to Tell You, Kureishi describes Goldhawk Road with deadpan humour: “Hijabed Middle Eastern women shopped in the market, where you could buy massive bolts of vivid cloth, crocodile-skin shoes, scratchy underwear and jewellery, “snide” CDs and DVDs, parrots and luggage, as well as illuminated 3-D pictures of Mecca and Jesus. (One time, in the old city of Marrakech, I was asked if I’d seen anything like it before. I could only reply that I’d come all this way only to be reminded on Shepherd’s Bush market.)”

This kind of London scares narrow nationalists who fear the onslaught of immigrants changing Britain – whatever that means. As if to reassure Middle England of his Britishness, the Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been making much of his fondness for British (as against his native Scottish) culture, and there are renewed efforts to infuse British identity among immigrants. The other day a cartoonist drew two Muslim men walking by a mosque, with one telling the other: “I know my Shakespeare and Dickens, but how am I supposed to learn binge drinking?” (Indeed, as Henry, a memorable character in Kureishi’s new novel explains, he likes the idea of London being one of the biggest Muslim cities in the world as “the price of colonialism and its only virtue.”)

Salil Tripathi on Hanif Kureishi’s latest novel. Pankaj Mishra also has something to tell you.