I almost know Salman Rushdie better as a fearsome table-tennis opponent than as a man of letters and our sittings took place in the framework of encounters over the ping-pong table. Nothing involving Salman can of course be quite straightforward and our encounters (at a necessarily unspecified location) were hedged about with the protocol of high security. After a portrait and several prints I made a final lithograph in which Salman is equated with Dreyfus. He wears a (fictitious) T-shirt inscribed with the cryptic name ‘Jack Hughes’ to echo Zola’s famous accusation.

Tom Phillips 1993