What is of interest here is that each of these critics was writing at a time of perceived social upheaval: Coleridge wrote Church and State between Catholic emancipation in 1829 and the First Reform Act of 1932; Arnold penned Culture and Anarchy just after the Second Reform Act (1867) and in the wake of the Hyde Park Riots and resulting fear of working-class anarchy; Leavis’s entire career coincided with the multiple and sequential upheavals of mass popular culture, war, decolonization, and, latterly, immigration. When McEwan and Amis return to these authority figures after 9/11—even in a spirit of critical engagement—they display not just a particular kind of mysophobic social conservatism but also a fantasy return to the womb, with its comforting feeling of an organic, continuous, and racially homogeneous national culture.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 90