As his new play The Spank opens in Italy, the writer talks about the power of ludicrous ideas, the crisis facing the middle class – and why he can’t get white liberals off his phone
Hanif Kureishi has been reflecting on toxic masculinity. He has heard a lot about it in the past year and it has entered the fiction he has been writing over lockdown – at quite a rate by the sound of it – and sparked stories about predation, sexual misdemeanour and “what’s going on between men and women”.
But he is just as interested in the benign, everyday dynamic between male friends. Most of the men he knows are good people, he says, who get together to talk about music and books, tease each other and chew the cud about life. He misses them now, locked away in his study in west London, although he has grownup sons up the road for company (they live with their mother). There’s the dog, too, which they take to the park together most days.
