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“... intellectuals – including such leading literary figures as George Orwell, Kingsley Amis and Iris Murdoch – were strongly attracted to Communism.’ Holroyd is exasperated by Shaw’s delusions and alarmed by where they take him: ‘Our question is not to kill or not to kill,’ he quotes Shaw as writing in 1932, ‘but how to select the right ...”

“... sample the trays of vol-au-vents and finger-friendly desserts, iced fancies and decorated chocs. Iris Murdoch, white-faced, bluff, confident, sometimes turned up and nibbled. V.S. Pritchett was usually a guest with his wife, Dorothy, a laughing teasing couple. ‘That’s very Irish,’ Pritchett murmured of ...”

“... Mann slithers about searching for the ‘continuum’ which will bind the AA Book of the Road to Iris Murdoch. Connections can be found: in cross-subsidisation (‘schlock pays for art’), for example. It is possible to set up polar models with customer-oriented products (M & B romances) at one extreme and creative literature (...”

“... at least if they’ve had any education; they’re moral babies. Here Johnston seems close to Iris Murdoch, who asserted that there is no ‘responsive superthou’. It’s this kind of conception of God that moves Thomas Nagel to say: ‘It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God … It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be ...”

“... were ever two writers whom Appelfeld absolutely should not sound like, they are Walter Pater and Iris Murdoch. Yet here is Appelfeld a-kind-of-ing away with those best of them. This particular locution, which, should seldom be indulged since it lacks all true particularity, has long been in evidence in Appelfeld’s books, for in For Every Sin it is ...”

“... about a lavishly subsidised event in Venice in July 1960 (others in attendance were Moravia, Iris Murdoch and Herbert Read): The main event, from the point of view of sheer scandal, was a series of furious clashes between Mr Shils and William [Phillips], on the subject of mass culture, naturally. I swear Shils is Dr Pangloss reborn and without Dr ...”

“... phonetic deformations, his upmarket puns and the rollicking argot and you can see why the young Iris Murdoch, who was Queneau’s admirer, friend but not, for once, we gather from her recent biographer, lover, made a poor fist of translating Pierrot mon ami. Some will object that bunched pages of endnotes don’t belong with novels like these, whose ...”

“... in the church – a middle-class woman, whose husband was a doctor – had lent me some novels by Iris Murdoch, and some works of apologetics and soft-theological books by someone called Francis Schaeffer. I read Pascal and G.K. Chesterton and Kierkegaard and C.S. Lewis. I became interested in the philosophy of religion and in exegetical criticism. I ...”

“... then toppled her faith: ‘This conversion,’ O’Connor noted tartly, ‘was achieved by Miss Iris Murdoch.’ Like Lowell, Hester ended up leaving the Church, much to O’Connor’s distress. ‘As for biographies,’ O’Connor once observed, ‘there won’t be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and ...”

“... moving to study philosophy at Edinburgh University and then at Oxford, where he was taught by Iris Murdoch. Her scepticism about Oxford’s fad for linguistic philosophy was shared by another of Nairn’s future mentors, Ernest Gellner, whose polemic Words and Things drew a connection between the insular preoccupations of the Oxford faculty and their ...”

“... is to advert to the fact that at no point in the book does he (or indeed, more surprisingly, Iris Murdoch in her enthusiastic review of 1962) show any interest in providing a validation for his insights and claims. Relying (presumably) on the evidence of a certain kind of robust and aggressive common sense, the book contains no truth-criteria by ...”

“... ex-musician, ex-name photographer, current burnout, lucks onto a great scoop: a supposedly dead Murdoch substitute being pleasured by a lively Duchess of York clone. Nobody wants to know. Canary Wharf yawns in his face. It’s the end of the road for Denny, seaside exile in West Sussex. Time spools backwards into a newsreel of childhood: ‘Grey ...”

“... witness-box come successively Edna O’Brien, Margaret Drabble, Penelope Mortimer, Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch. In the case of three, perhaps four, of the witnesses nothing is said about how they give their evidence. In the two years that Rebecca West was contributing to the Clarion, 1912 and 1913, she seldom wrote about books and so had no need to wring ...”

“... 17th-century and Romantic poetry to the fiction of near contemporaries such as Doris Lessing and Iris Murdoch. And even on occasions when the Potter novels don’t ‘get up and walk’ – which they mostly do, with considerable energy – they are always acutely intelligent about their lineage. Byatt has implied that she did not at first think of ...”

“... novelistic and poetic sea; where she is theoretical, he cleaves to texts. There is something else: Iris Murdoch beautifully espoused the Tolstoyan ideal, but could not achieve it in her own creative work. The contradiction between her promotion of freedom in fiction and the thin control imposed by her on her own fictional characters was almost ...”