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Chronicities

Christopher Ricks, 21 November 1985

Gentlemen in England 
by A.N. Wilson.
Hamish Hamilton, 311 pp., £9.95, September 1985, 0 02 411165 1
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... a clean true plot, whereas The Healing Art, which could have been even better, could have been an Iris Murdoch novel that was good, never knew what to do with the situation it so compellingly established. The dramatic monologue, which Wilson has pondered with imaginative pertinacity, is the art of rotatory unadvancing character, and of situation strictly ...

He or She

Robert Taubman, 8 November 1979

The Twyborn Affair 
by Patrick White.
Cape, 432 pp., £5.95
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... as Eudoxia, ‘expert in protocol and mayhem’. One has seen before in Huxley or Firbank, and in Iris Murdoch, the same sort of manipulation of character, the same sort of contrived pattern-making, together with all the risks of mis-relation to a human reality. In Eddie’s case, the protocol and mayhem are particularly difficult to square with a final ...

At the Pool

Inigo Thomas, 21 June 2018

... like Joseph Mitchell’s collected New York journalism, Up in the Old Hotel, but who knows why? Iris Murdoch was a Sprawson enthusiast. In her review of the book, published in the New York Review, she revealed her own aquatic inclinations: I am not in the athletic sense a keen swimmer, but I am a devoted one. On hot days in the Oxford summer my husband ...

Finding out who you were

Paul Delany, 6 August 1992

Murther and Walking Spirits 
by Robertson Davies.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 357 pp., £14.95, October 1991, 1 85619 078 1
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... with everyday concerns, and is active mainly within the horizon of an individual life. With Iris Murdoch or Anthony Powell – Davies’s closest equivalents among British novelists – mythic seriousness cohabits somewhat uneasily with social comedy. On the other side of the Atlantic, a mythic hero like Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King also ...

When the Costume Comes Off

Adam Mars-Jones: Philip Hensher, 14 April 2011

King of the Badgers 
by Philip Hensher.
Fourth Estate, 436 pp., £18.99, March 2011, 978 0 00 730133 1
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... but it’s one that doesn’t lose its sting. Gay men make a strong showing in the novels of Iris Murdoch, with Michael in The Bell (1958) judged not on the basis of his orientation but for his refusal of the claim love made on him. Axel and Simon in A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970) are luckier and happier, but here again no privileges or penalties ...

Nutmegged

Frank Kermode: The War against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 by Martin Amis., 10 May 2001

The War against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 
by Martin Amis.
Cape, 506 pp., £20, April 2001, 0 224 05059 1
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... over which Amis’s pencil, his lifting gear, hovers and is regretfully withdrawn. Iris Murdoch makes a futile attempt to avoid cliché by using inverted commas: ‘the wrong end of the stick’, ‘worthwhile activities’. But you can’t slip away as easily as that: ‘a cliché or an approximation, wedged between inverted commas, is ...

Diary

Susannah Clapp: On Angela Carter, 12 March 1992

... ever, mentioned in the same breath, or even the same paragraph, as such peers as Anthony Powell or Iris Murdoch. Fans such as Kingsley Amis and Anthony Burgess praise Ballard to the skies but they themselves are classified differently, as, God help us, “serious writers” in comparison.’ She won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1968 (and described with ...

Diary

Marina Warner: Carmen Callil’s Causes, 15 December 2022

... When Carmen moved to Chatto as their managing director in 1982 she lavished care on her authors: Iris Murdoch, Hilary Mantel, Hermione Lee and other Bloomsbury biographers and historians. She published Angela Carter’s last, whirling novels, Nights at the Circus (1984) and Wise Children (1991). (It was around this time she accepted my novel The Lost ...

In the Company of Confreres

Terry Eagleton: ‘Modern British Fiction’, 12 December 2002

On Modern British Fiction 
edited by Zachary Leader.
Oxford, 328 pp., £14.99, October 2002, 0 19 924932 6
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... catches on, one can imagine the Crime Writers Guild threatening to withdraw their labour. Whether Iris Murdoch was a lady or a woman is hard to say. In a busily energetic, impressively wide-ranging chapter, Valentine Cunningham lavishes the customary critical praise on her conception of human life as sprawling, contingent and delightfully muddled. This ...

I came with a sword

Toril Moi: Simone Weil’s Way, 1 July 2021

The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas 
by Robert Zaretsky.
Chicago, 181 pp., £16, February 2021, 978 0 226 54933 0
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... theory, moral philosophy and theology. She has inspired thinkers as different as Maurice Blanchot, Iris Murdoch and Giorgio Agamben. Wittgensteinians such as Peter Winch and Cora Diamond have felt kinship with her ideas about language and morality. The feminist philosopher Andrea Nye has suggested that Weil’s emphasis on obligations rather than rights ...

Trapped in a Veil

Leo Robson: ‘The Bee Sting’, 5 October 2023

The Bee Sting 
by Paul Murray.
Hamish Hamilton, 656 pp., £18.99, June, 978 0 241 35395 0
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... obscured by lesser narrative forms such as gossip, newspaper articles and history books, and Iris Murdoch, who argued for the virtue of authorial love over ‘dryness’. But the effort to avoid writing a ‘crystalline’ novel, defined by Murdoch as ‘a small quasi-allegorical object portraying the human ...

Shakespeare the Novelist

John Sutherland, 28 September 1989

The Vision of Elena Silves 
by Nicholas Shakespeare.
Collins, 263 pp., £11.95, September 1989, 0 00 271031 5
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Billy Bathgate 
by E.L. Doctorow.
Macmillan, £11.95, September 1989, 0 333 51376 2
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Buffalo Afternoon 
by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer.
Hamish Hamilton, 535 pp., £12.95, August 1989, 0 241 12634 7
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The Message to the Planet 
by Iris Murdoch.
Chatto, 563 pp., £13.95, October 1989, 0 7011 3479 8
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... tender and moving in its treatment of delayed casualty. The Message to the Planet is Iris Murdoch’s 24th novel since Under the Net in 1954. Some of them (like this one and The Sea, The Sea) have been among the longest works of fiction produced in post-war Britain, a period which has generally favoured brevity. Frank Baldanza, who has ...

Darts for art’s sake

Julian Symons, 28 September 1989

London Fields 
by Martin Amis.
Cape, 470 pp., £12.95, September 1989, 0 224 02609 7
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... least affects, its material. It is aggressively masculine, would hardly do for themes handled by Iris Murdoch or Anita Brookner, might be found crude or distasteful by them. This style fits perfectly the activities of parthuman Keith, Nicola and Guy, less well the naive approach to nuclear weapons made by the writer of ‘Thinkability’, and the ...

Something else

Jonathan Coe, 5 December 1991

In Black and White 
by Christopher Stevenson.
New Caxton Press, 32 pp., £1.95
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The Tree of Life 
by Hugh Nissenson.
Carcanet, 159 pp., £6.95, September 1991, 0 85635 874 6
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Cley 
by Carey Harrison.
Heinemann, 181 pp., £13.99, November 1991, 0 434 31368 8
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... many of our more distinguished novelists blanch. (It will be a while, I think, before we see an Iris Murdoch novel with the words CATCH THESE EVIL SEX KILLERS emblazoned across the cover.) In Black and White therefore both looks and feels almost exactly like a tabloid newspaper, and this is bound to make differences to the way we treat it. Inevitably ...

Playmates

Theodore Zeldin, 13 June 1991

Dead Certainties 
by Simon Schama.
Granta, 334 pp., £15.99, May 1991, 0 14 014230 4
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... at the University of East Anglia should be a compulsory qualification, nor did it suggest that Iris Murdoch should have stuck to philosophy and Anita Brookner to art; nor did it examine the tradition of novel-writing by academics; going back to the Water Babies and Alice. What the Telegraph did not like was the idea that everyone had a novel in ...

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