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“... Lucia Popp, for that matter? (‘Of course, Terry, the perfect Queen of the Night.’) Did I think Iris Murdoch and Brigid Brophy had had an affair? What was Adrienne Rich’s girlfriend like? When was somebody ever going to spill the beans on Eudora Welty and Elizabeth Bowen?Was there some way, I wonder now, that she wanted me to absolve her? Was the ...”

“... come from the East (Solzhenitsyn) or of deliberate archaising if they come from the West (say, Iris Murdoch). The pure novel, the quintessential novel, does not acknowledge any family relation with these distant branches. It is a formal, priestly exercise whose first great celebrant was James. The fact that there are no Jamesian novels being produced ...”

“... ways Kerouac was a better model for Updike than the rarefied writers he loved more: Henry Green, Iris Murdoch, Proust. I don’t use teletype paper, but there isn’t an awful lot of revision when I’m writing – things either grind to a halt or they keep on moving … Kerouac was right in emphasising a certain flow, a certain ease. Wasn’t he ...”

“... festooned in scrap metal, youth hostellers with chapped knees and laminated maps. Cycling was an Iris Murdoch novel (as she herself batted around Oxford, gown flying). There is a bicycle silhouette by Charles Mozley on the spine of the dust jacket for The Sandcastle. English schoolmasters, in the sad twilight, disappointed and damply lustful, trundle ...”

“... 1954, Hackenfeller’s Ape won the first novel prize at Cheltenham Literary Festival, beating Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net into second place. Brophy and Murdoch, who was a decade older, got on immediately. Brophy had just married Michael Levey, whom she’d met at a New Year’s party. ‘I was struck,’ he ...”

“... of certain writers. Was Sterne Irish? Was Oliver Goldsmith Irish? Was Robert Tressell Irish? Is Iris Murdoch Irish? But the argument about who was gay and who was not and how we know is more difficult. How can someone be gay if, as in the case of Gogol, there is no direct evidence? Yet if you trawl through Gogol’s stories with grim determination, you ...”

“... where she attended lectures by Isaiah Berlin and had classes with A.J. Ayer, Stuart Hampshire and Iris Murdoch; most fatefully, a sojourn at the Sorbonne, where, like Audrey Hepburn pixie-ing through the new philosophy of Empathicalism in Funny Face, she met – oh, enough roll call. You can read about it in Chapter 11 of Moser, or in Alice Kaplan’s ...”