My Best Books

‘Bald, short, fat, clever”, Ian McEwan’s latest protagonist gorges on junk food, routinely cheats on his myriad wives and lovers, robs a dead employee of his breakthrough ideas about cheap renewable energy, and rests in his randy, portly way on the laurels of the Nobel Prize in physics that he won many years before. Surely no biographical truth could ever match this florid fiction? Yet McEwan, the most consistently science-friendly major writer of his age, has even at this early stage felt the shock of recognition from his collaborators on the other side of the “two cultures” divide.