In the folklore of English letters, the literary friendship between the four dominant voices of the modern British novel - Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis and Julian Barnes - is already the stuff of legend. That was even before we learnt that for two of them the bond even extended to offering safe haven against the threat of state-sponsored assassins.
Twenty years almost to the day after Rushdie had a death sentence declared against him by the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini, it has been revealed that he was offered shelter by McEwan in a cottage in the Cotswolds. There the two writers hid away shortly after the fatwa was issued on 14 February, 1989.
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