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“... above the lip – this explains the philtrum – and wipes its mind clean. The unborn narrator of Ian McEwan’s new novel, Nutshell, isn’t omniscient but has formidable mental powers, able to analyse, synthesise and, necessarily, use language. He also has tastes, preferences, opinions, all of which logically depend on something he hasn’t ...”

“... against her. Her rout – in the city of many previous literary defeats, from James himself to Ian McEwan – is a reversal that brilliantly catches up and concludes the various narrative strands that the novel has so deftly kept in play. Initially we have been led to assume, as Rachel herself does, that she is in control and reliable, but our ...”

“... Folkestone tradition: Eliot with Margate in The Waste Land, Pinter with Sidcup in The Caretaker, McEwan with Dollis Hill in The Innocent. Graham Swift knows all about such effects, and knows – as Pinter does – that they will probably now be self-conscious, deliberate dives into the sublime banal. Nowadays a novelist’s characters may themselves be ...”

“... It is instructive to see such men sketched, as they are here, solely in their relation to Wilson. Ian Calder, for example, had been one of Wilson’s lovers. He was a brilliant and charming young man – not, perhaps, quite the Adonis, the nonpareil, he is here made out to be, but found fascinating by everybody. Miraculously free of ill-will, he was ...”

“... Julian Gloag’s Our Mother’s House in her childhood, and I suspect she has become an admirer of Ian McEwan since then. In the brochure which Cape has published to accompany the four books, she comments: ‘I am aware that Sexual Intercourse is an uncomfortable book. It’s not meant to be a cosy read. It’s a book about family life, a subject I find ...”

“... for novelists to acknowledge their sources. At the beginning of The Child in Time, for example, Ian McEwan lists Christina Hardyment’s Dream Babies, David Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order and Joseph Chilton Pearce’s Magical Child. In Time’s Arrow, Martin Amis acknowledges, among a number of others, Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi ...”

“... Others are driven by something like fear: in much British fiction of the 1980s and 1990s – in Ian McEwan or Martin Amis, say – the poor or their representatives erupt like an insistent dream into middle-class life as stalkers or thugs. Fonseca also writes about stalkers and thugs, but from both worlds at once. And all that can reliably be said ...”

“... in Australia in 1983. At the heart of this novella, whose disturbing power recalls the fiction of Ian McEwan and Christina Stead, lies a family on the brink of collapse. Dexter and Athena, the parents, can barely bring themselves to check that their children are asleep at night before abandoning them in their beds to roam the streets of suburban ...”

“... stories written now in England or America – for example, those of Joyce Carol Oates or Ian McEwan. Indeed, there seems to be a whole genre of repulsive literature in our time written by mild, serious, high-minded people who strike one as not so much indulging in personal fantasies as producing the kind of things that they feel ought to be ...”

“... had exactly the same dénouement. The first section of that novel borrowed much of its action from Ian McEwan (the body kept in the house in The Cement Garden; the corpse cut up into pieces in The Innocent). These Demented Lands revisits the weird island setting of John Banville’s Ghosts. One section of The Sopranos is laid out as a screenplay, which ...”

“... North American reviewers treated it as straightforward memoir; others regarded it as a novel. Ian McEwan rightly sees it as a ‘Borgesian marriage of fiction and history’. ‘Ulrikke’, a story Borges wrote around the time of his visit, features a passionate encounter with a Norwegian woman as the narrator travels ‘towards Edinburgh’; as many ...”

“... through tough times. The brothers’ parents joined us and we watched the evening news together. Ian Blair, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, was at a mosque saying that ‘only communities can stop terrorism.’ Their mother pointed to the Muslim cleric standing behind him. ‘Look at what’s on his head,’ she said giggling, ‘it’s too ...”

“... were published with two sets of covers to fit the self-images of two overlapping readerships, Ian McEwan’s The Daydreamer, marketed domestically as a children’s book, could be published in Italian translation as for adults. The Young Adult label has a faintly disparaging though illogical overtone (would anyone want to be described as an old ...”

“... readers, encouraged some novelists almost to usurp the short story’s usual dimensions. When Ian McEwan moved on from short-story writing, it was to produce a first "novel", The Cement Garden (1978), not much in excess of one hundred pages.’ Ah, so that is why McEwan’s novels are so short. What layers of ...”

“... enjoys. It was arguably a return to the form that best suited her imagination, well described by Ian McEwan as both ‘fastidious and sensual’, by giving it constraints to work against. For Carter ‘the really important thing’ was narrative, as she said in the introduction to Expletives Deleted, a collection of essays and reviews which appeared ...”