F.L.F.

Flickering Log Fire – a private joke between Ian McEwan and Craig Raine, signifying a cliché.

According to Daniel Zalewski’s New Yorker profile of Ian McEwan, the novelist shows his unpublished manuscripts to three friends: the historian Timothy Garton Ash, the philosopher Galen Strawson, and the poet Craig Raine.

Raine’s speciality is lapses in prose. McEwan spoke of an incident with the manuscript of “The Child in Time”: “Stephen Lewis visits his friend, and they sit before a flickering log fire, drinking wine. Craig mocked ‘flickering log fire‘ heavily. Much later, I read a piece of Craig’s in his book ‘Haydn and the Valve Trumpet.’ There was a cliché, and I marked it ‘F.L.F.’: Flickering Log Fire.”