McEwan says the protagonist of his next novel “is a Nobel prize-winning physicist who faces media attacks after he suggests that men outnumber women at the top of his profession because of inherent differences in their brains, rather than any gender discrimination. McEwan found himself under a similar kind of fire last summer, besieged by the media after he told an Italian newspaper that he ‘despise[d] Islamism, because it wants to create a society that I detest’.”