The day after Christmas, the writer Hanif Kureishi had a fall and he now lies, mostly paralysed, in an Italian hospital. Remarkably, within a few days of surgery, he has been tweeting a kind of diary (via his son) on his Twitter account.

I encountered the work of Hanif Kureishi in my late teens, some years after reading Rushdie and Indian writers in English. If the latter excited me, Kureishi galvanised me. The wit, vigour, sexual edge, the hyperkinetic contemporaneity of My Beautiful Laundrette and The Buddha of Suburbia, were like a soundtrack for my own young quests and restlessness.  Over the years though, I lost interest in many of the writers who had first sharpened my appetites. I grew impatient and even bored of their masculine insularity. As I grew older, my need for that form of youthfully libidinous work ebbed and my access to a greater variety of writers, working from a range of worlds, not always Western, answered new questions in my heart.