Click the image below to go to the interview, in two parts, with one of the English language’s best living writers, who with this other great writer shares a deep concern for issues facing our planet’s environment and that writer’s uncanny ability to personalize it, as he talks about

the inspiration for Michael Beard, the anti-hero in his comic novel Solar about climate change. The idea came to McEwan when he attended a gathering of 35 Nobel prizewinners, all men of a certain age, ‘big beasts’ in the scientific world who were nevertheless ‘living in their own shadow’ with their most creative years behind them.