Back then, literary England was "a BBC, plummy-voiced, West London, educated thing that just wasn't getting the whole place," says Bill Buford, who published Kureishi when he was editor of Granta in the 1980s and is now a staff writer at The New Yorker.
Skip forward 5 years and the world we sell to is now far more educated, however things are just as tough.
In "A Mother's Place" she draws on statistics and on interviews with 40 mothers and 12 fathers to argue that even for favoured, educated women, things are tough: glass ceilings, double-shifts at office and home, subtle or not-so-subtle pay gaps.
When you get that fuller picture and you start to form an educated opinion, things come to light, and it was absolutely that act of discovery on this project every day.
A 10 year old can clearly see the unworthiness of such a candidate because he has been educated that things like bullying, sexism, racism and exclusion are empirically wrong.
"They need to sort it out really, I mean I know what's right and wrong, but if somebody else isn't that well educated and things like that, then the media is what they listen to, then they're going to listen to that kind of thing".
"Our generation's Sputnik moment is back," he said last month: "We need to do what America has always been known for: building, innovating, educating, making things".
"A lot has been done to educate on things like sleep position," she said of the efforts to teach parents about SIDS.
So, to get the kind of change in thinking you want, what needs to be done? A. One of the things I think is really important is for people to be educated about simple things, like how much time you don't save by switching in and out of lanes and disturbing the flow of traffic.
