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“... It aspired to art and was art. Notwithstanding marvellously rich work by William Golding, Iris Murdoch and the grossly under-rated Angus Wilson, the English novel at this time seemed to some of us to be pottering into near-extinction as a serious art form. As Johnson put it, ‘literary forms do become exhausted, clapped out, as well ... That is ...”

“... professional critics, who are favoured: V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, David Storey, Paul Scott, Iris Murdoch, for instance. Beyond that it isn’t easy to see much significance in the list – perhaps there’s a nostalgia for the old Empire (Scott, J.G. Farrell, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, plus Nadine Gordimer, Naipaul, and P.H. Newby on ...”

“... were timidly admitted into English fiction after the Lady Chatterley trial. Angus Wilson and Iris Murdoch are said to have steeled themselves and forced the f-words into their prose. At first they fairly leaped off the page, but forty-odd years later they have settled in and may occur in almost any work of fiction. In an essay on ‘Oaths and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... origins, and so on’. ‘And so on’ includes a good number of women, who, a few paragraphs on Iris Murdoch apart, figure not at all. ‘And so on’ also includes the events of 1968 and 1989 (which made all sorts of intellectuals think about their obligations to political causes), the Vietnam War, apartheid, the feminist movement, and many other ...”

“... true (analytic literature) or to be made up (fiction). As John Bayley once remarked, writing about Iris Murdoch, it is bound to be a tautology to talk about ‘freedom’ in a novel, in which only the author is free to do as he likes. Pushkin, and Tolstoy following him, liked to emphasise that their characters ‘took charge’, and that they were ...”

“... directions is still in the bones of the modern novel reader, and in novelists as different as Iris Murdoch and Margaret Drabble. Such readers and writers are in no sense Victorian throwbacks, yet they know in their bones that the true English novel is destined to a Victorian purpose and persona, in whatever modified circumstances. Pritchett ...”

“... from Dickens, strays at times (unintentionally, I think) into the territory of William Golding and Iris Murdoch – but it does go in for resurrection in a big way. It digs up the past in all directions. The major strand of the plot concerns an archaeological site in Dorset, the excavation of a tumulus thought to be about 4500 years old, or perhaps ...”

“... any money that comes along when they (not their heirs) can use it. It was interesting to see that Iris Murdoch left £2 million. The novelist’s literary papers were acquired, mid-career, by the University of Iowa. Of course, I have no idea how much of Murdoch’s substantial estate derived from that sale, but anyone ...”

“... translation), prints the latest translations of Western novelists, such as Camus, Irving Shaw or Iris Murdoch. My God! She’s reading Updike’s Marry me. What’s this – a desperate attempt to bridge the generation gap? The magazine is extremely popular with younger people, sometimes it even dictates fashions, as was the case with Hermann Hesse’s ...”

“... Mind-Body Problem. William James and his sister Alice feature in The Dark Sister (1991), a book Iris Murdoch called ‘brilliantly ingenious, beautifully written and thoroughly alarming’. More recently, the physicist Samuel Mallach appears in Properties of Light (2000); Gödel and Spinoza are the focus of her non-fiction works Incompleteness: The ...”

“... businessman. (Florence’s mother has been a friend of Elizabeth David and is a friend of Iris Murdoch.) Both stories are set at a very precise date, with debates about socialism, Britain’s decline as a world power, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Both works exude a sense, alive in McEwan’s work since The Child in Time (1987), of ...”

“... Shorn of its theological trappings, her point is the one made a century and a half later by Iris Murdoch: the engineering of life simply for human benefit manifests a lack of ‘humility’, of ‘selfless respect for the independent existence’ of the creatures and lifeforms which belong to the world in which we live. It is undeniable that ...”

“... we thus learn, lives in ‘a rumpled terrace house to the north of Clapham in London’, whereas Iris Murdoch, when she’s writing, chooses to make do with a ‘compact top-floor pied-à-terre’. V.S. Pritchett is encountered in ‘a handsome terrace to the north of Regent’s Park’, and Emma Tennant in ‘a comfortably and attractively bruised ...”

“... with symmetrical couplings and decouplings between characters, and an atmosphere of homosexual Iris Murdoch. (The book uneasily describes itself as ‘a comedy of sexual manners’.) Another problem is that few of the characters are likeable or especially worthy, and they are engaged only in somewhat self-obsessed emotional and sexual ...”