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“... my friends, I say to the teacups and spoons. Such intense love for Puss – more and more,’ Iris Murdoch wrote in her journal. It was the summer of 1993. Her 25th novel was just being published, and she was working at her last, Jackson’s Dilemma. Who was Jackson? Puss asked her, but she could not tell. ‘I don’t think he’s been born ...”

“... George Barker (The Dead Seagull) and Craig Raine, and who had once heard the plot of a novel by Iris Murdoch. The novel’s characters were indeed Romantic, if by that one means fabulous, fanciful, whimsical, high-flown, etc, as under Roget 515: Lucas Salik, Anne Cowdenbeath, Cora Godfrey and the rest seemed precocious fictions, made palpable only by ...”

“... mean it’s thinking, and it’s a programme of action.’ That’s Crimond, the high-flyer, in Iris Murdoch’s 1989 The Book of the Brotherhood, replying to a question about his projected book. His envious interlocutor Gerrard asks:   ‘So it’s like a very long pamphlet?’   ‘No. It’s not a long simplification. It’s about ...”

“... before. Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot (née Bosanquet), Mary Midgley (née Scrutton) and Iris Murdoch all matriculated at Oxford in the late 1930s. When most of the men went off to war, they found themselves, as women philosophy students, in a very unusual situation – not in the minority and on the periphery, but central and predominant. (The ...”

“... of a later perspective (real or imagined) into an earlier one. We may be a little surprised to see Iris Murdoch playing with the Russian Formalists’ distinction of story and plot (fabula and syuzhet, events in their chronological order and events in the order of their arrangement). Or even to see her playing at all. But we should not be, and for several ...”

“... Price if she so wishes. In summary, as at full length, The Sweets of Pimlico recalls the work of Iris Murdoch. But if certain points of detail and emphasis seem to reflect her influence in particular, the genre concerned has attracted other distinguished practitioners and goes back a long way. Forster, especially in the earlier novels, and ...”

“... by playing a South Coast matinée rather than wrangle with literati over the competing merits of Iris Murdoch, Jan Morris and Keri Hulme.This year the judges did make one interesting – and perhaps influential – early decision. Publishers have hitherto been allowed to nominate four books for the prize, but also submit a ‘B’ list which the judges ...”

“... in the wake of Sartre and Camus, and before the Sixties became the Sixties. William Golding, Iris Murdoch, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Thomas Pynchon, who else? Oë wrote his graduation thesis on Sartre (in 1959), and evokes Camus in Hiroshima Notes: ‘A plague that ravages a city in North Africa, for example, appears as an abnormal ...”

“... and Greville and Sidney, for Hobbes and Cudworth, for Locke and Berkeley, as for J.L. Austin and Iris Murdoch and himself. Similarly he assumes that Americans like Santayana and John Crowe Ransom and Kenneth Burke, when they speak of language, have in their sights and in their ears the same language as the one that he and Austin and ...”

“... I’ve been basking in a warm glow from A.N. Wilson’s recent book about Iris Murdoch* – I mean its way of holding Plato and Kant not quite on a level with each other but far above everyone else except Hegel, about whom more later, in its account of her attention to the classical masters. This is a big merit, and a needful one because others, including her official biographer, have been at fault here ...”

“... of other writers and critics – Raymond Williams, Doris Lessing and (perhaps most suggestively) Iris Murdoch – who were all talking about something similar at the same time. You can describe it in many different ways, but it comes down to the disintegration of the representative function of fiction, as much as its representational one. As McCarthy ...”

“... and the novelist she quotes to such good effect, and with whom she shares certain affinities, is Iris Murdoch (the other novelist who comes to mind in reading her is Henry James). She is interested, that is to say, in the mixing but not the muddling of traditions, and in psychoanalysis as inescapably a moral enterprise – ‘tending as it does towards ...”

“... Attenborough in pursuit. It was my pleasure to travel with my old friend and newly-minted Dame, Iris Murdoch. I’ve never travelled first before, and well! Cocktails, champagne, caviar, lobster ... Young Dame Iris, by the way, took all as her customary due – no gastronomic problems for her. However fast asleep she ...”

“... shooting, many of Frank’s poems, journal entries and letters to his parents, to Edward and to Iris Murdoch. Such memorials had become almost a convention of the times, at least on the intellectual left – Frank was both intellectual and Communist – following similar books in memory of John Cornford, Julian Bell and David Haden-Guest, all killed in ...”