Novels, for me, have come from somewhere I wasn’t looking. In my twenties I was carrying an idea about a woman wandering around Ireland on a quest she didn’t understand and I sat in the Reading Room o

After quitting tennis without explanation in his mid-20s, ...

Ian McEwan is strolling through the garden of his Cotswolds manor house. Bees waft drowsily between wildflowers. Plump apples, pears and walnuts bauble the trees. Vibrant cerulean-blue damselflies hov

Life has a bad habit of mirroring art. Sometimes, this can be in a deeply sad way. A while after I wrote about the assumption of guilt in a traumatised young woman with poor social skills, I watched a

The world according to…

Andrew Doyle is an author, journalist and satirist