“Twenty years almost to the day after [Salman] Rushdie had a death sentence declared against him by the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini, it has been revealed that he was offered shelter by [Ian] McEwan in a cottage in the Cotswolds. There the two writers hid away shortly after the fatwa was issued on 14 February, 1989. This intimate detail is contained in a long profile of McEwan published in next week’s issue of the New Yorker.”