Who was John Williams? He taught at a respectable American university. He was, as brief obituaries testified, well thought of, but not “stellar”. His contributions to scholarship were minor. But, significantly, he was one of the first teachers of “creative writing”. McEwan, coincidentally, is one of the earliest products of the UK’s pioneer creative-writing programme at the University of East Anglia. The background to Stoner will probably not interest most of those who rushed to order their copies from Amazon on July 5. The orthodoxy in the teaching of literature at university level shifts every 40 years or so, as the dinosaurs give way to the Young Turks. During William Stoner’s career the struggle was between “philology” (English literature studied alongside Latin) and “New Criticism” (close reading, paying attention exclusively to the “words on the page”). Stoner is a philologist – increasingly isolated but dedicated, body and soul, to the books he loves. His PhD topic and one book is on prosody in Chaucer. His courses on medieval literature are dry – but, in their way, passionate. He is at permanent war with the head of his department, who is a new man and a New Critic who malevolently keeps Stoner down, teaching, year after year that unsexiest of courses, “remedial writing” – something normally assigned to “adjunct” teachers. Stoner is finally promoted while he’s lying, cancer-stricken on his deathbed caressing not his unloved wife or daughter (both estranged), but an old, much-loved book. McEwan went out on a limb calling it the finest death scene in literature.