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“... of the Sun ‘Ballard became an important mainstream novelist,’ and went on to compare him to Ian McEwan and Iain Banks – intending that as praise. Ballard hadn’t really switched to writing conventional fiction resembling either of Bradbury’s examples, but it’s true that in 1984 the mainstream suddenly discovered him. Empire of the Sun was ...”

“... It is no coincidence, as the academics say, that what joins Karl Miller, now of the LRB, to Ian Hamilton, some time of the New Review, is a dominant, not to say overbearing, personality. Either man is able, by force of self-belief, to make good contributors expend, on an article, energy that they might otherwise have saved up to write books. Getting ...”

“... have gone in for ‘experiment’, from James, Ford and Conrad and Joyce to, say, Golding and Ian McEwan. Lawrence saw how much might be done in a novel, how free it could be of constraints, how apt to the business of making it new; the novel was protean, insisting on its own virtually infinite possibilities, experimental in its very nature. Johnson ...”

“... McEwan, I tried to call you on the radio telephone, when our old flatmate, John Webb, fell overboard in a gale off the coast of Long Island a few years ago and was nearly swept south to Bermuda. But the old Oxford number had been disconnected, and your publisher told me that you were ‘indisputably a hugely important literary phenomenon’ and not taking any calls ...”

“... had been circumscribed by alliance with the dominant USA, neatly symbolised by the importation of Ian Mac-Gregor to crush the miners. It has been too little remarked that by 1939 Britain’s leading Marxist economist, John Strachey, had been converted to a ‘New Deal’ strategy as the way forward. In 1945, the victorious Labour leaders were almost certainly ...”

“... was chosen as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, alongside Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. In the photo, she sits above Kazuo Ishiguro in a red and black checked dress with her hands clasped, the sole woman of colour. The following year her daughter Chiedu died of anorexia nervosa at the age of 23. She became the dedicatee of Head ...”

“... remarkable. Ask who the leading young British novelists are and you may well be told Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, William Boyd, Julian Barnes. Given that writers typically have long careers and get better with age, ‘young’ is not entirely a misnomer applied here. Like politicians, novelists can be youthful long after the point at which the careers of ...”

“... odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.’) Responding to Marr’s comments, Ian Jack, the editor of Granta, suggested that it would be more accurate to say there was a ‘lull’. Since, then, Robert McCrum, the literary editor of the Observer, has discussed the question more than once in his column, ‘The World of Books’. And in a ...”

“... flash and sizzle.’ Bellow is not one of those purely imaginative writers like Golding or Ian McEwan who invent copiously and logically from first premises. You cannot imagine him wondering what it is like to be an ape married to a young woman writer who is having trouble with her second novel after the success of the first. Or wondering what ...”

“... Machado de Assis and on to The Tale of Genji, and saluting new talent such as Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan. His own reflection on the extent of his literary travels was characteristic: ‘I am appalled by the amount I have read.’ His two volumes of autobiography were among the most popular and successful of his books, especially A Cab at the ...”

“... as Thomas Meaney called it last year, is a force to be reckoned with too. I don’t know if Ian McEwan had read Williams when he wrote On Chesil Beach (2007), but one way of thinking about that novel is as a slow-motion reimagining, complete with hints of past sexual abuse, of the excruciating wedding night in Stoner, which ends with Edith retching ...”

“... Constable, George Smith, John Blackwood, George Routledge, Frederick Macmillan, David Garnett, Ian Parsons, Allen Lane. It was one of the most highly regarded of today’s younger publishers, Peter Straus (now an agent), who commissioned the book. None of these coat-brushers of genius is a household name: most publishers remain invisible. And many of ...”

“... about the battle-readiness of the National Coal Board and the flakiness of its imported chief, Ian MacGregor, she resisted the impulse to take charge. She allowed herself to be persuaded by her cabinet secretary, Robin Butler, that it was too dangerous for the prime minister’s office to appear to be setting the terms of the dispute. She remained reliant ...”

“... and Lorna and Salman (though it’s nice that Gordon puts in the spiteful way Carter referred to Ian McEwan behind his back as ‘poor Ian’, as in, ‘poor Ian has been dreadfully overrated’ – she was always chippy about what she saw, with perfect accuracy, as her own relative ...”

“... sort of art-historical Humbert Humbert with traces of Clive Linley, the self-obsessed composer in Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam. He also has an Irish Catholic background replete with sodomitical priests and echoes of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This upbringing has made him unable to separate a love of art from sexual desire. He is on the search ...”