SOURCE: “A Dead Teenage Genius and Others,” in The Spectator, May 12, 1990, pp. 38-9.

In the following negative review of The Buddha of Suburbia, Clark describes Kureishi as “a man with a sense of adventure that extends little further than experimentation in metropolitan sex and drugs.”

After writing one homosexual screenplay, My Beautiful Launderette, and one heterosexual screenplay, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, it was a fair guess that Hanif Kureishi was going to turn the hero of his first novel into a raving bisexual. Mr Kureishi is a man with a sense of adventure that extends little further than experimentation in metropolitan sex and drugs. He recently gained fame as the Radio Four guest who unthinkingly announced that he found the Great London Poll Tax Riot ‘terrific’—if it was so ‘terrific’ then how come all the broken glass had been swept up by Sunday afternoon, 24 hours later...