Since the bombing of the Twin Towers in New York on 9/11, contemporary writers have been increasingly drawn into public debate about the relationship between literature and politics. Ian McEwan has become the most prolific of a number of British writers who appear to support the re-emergence of the author as public intellectual. McEwan's fiction bears comparison with Iris Murdoch's in the sense that an ethical perspective already evident in his writing has become increasingly pronounced in his most recent fiction. This similarity, added to the fact that Murdoch also spoke powerfully on public issues, offers the opportunity to consider the relationship between the ethical and the political in the work of two writers with similar literary and political drives.¹ This essay explores the strategies each writer develops when pressing political issues demand that they combine the role of the artist with that of public intellectual. It suggests that Murdoch's writing has much to offer contemporary writers faced with influential demands for public accountability.