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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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... over which Amis’s pencil, his lifting gear, hovers and is regretfully withdrawn.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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... another door has fallen off the kitchen units and I don’t care. I have decided to adopt the Iris Murdoch approach to keeping house, though I feel she might have managed this book-selling business in a more autocratic and interesting manner, this endless round of taxi-plane-taxi-interview-interview-gig-hotel.I email several different publicists to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”