“... 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 ...”

“... which generally comes with age, a trip writers in particular seem drawn to, Amis, Osborne, Larkin, Iris Murdoch all ending up at the spectrum’s crusty and clichéd end. If I haven’t, it’s partly due to circumstances: there has been so little that has happened to England since the 1980s that I have been happy about or felt able to endorse. One has ...”

“... publishing a book a year. Other Oxford notables who crossed the path of these aspirants included Iris Murdoch and Wallace Robson, a young don with a fearsome reputation for learning and judgment, a man whose attacks on the entire literary canon he was employed to teach were of a ferocity even Amis, by his own admission, could not aspire to. Most of the ...”

“... and Peter trilogy explores a life-long relationship between two men. He ignores the novels of Iris Murdoch, whose A Fairly Honourable Defeat, from 1970, features one of the most compelling portrayals of marriage between two men I know of. And he makes no mention of contemporary writers like Carol Anshaw, Michael Lowenthal and Stacey D’Erasmo, whose ...”

“... scornfully dismissed Compton-Burnett as unreadable, was loftily puzzled that some people thought Iris Murdoch a better novelist than herself, and expressed a fear that she might ‘turn into a writer like James Joyce’; there was little danger. In the flurry of chatter and prophecy that preceded the publication of Daphne du Maurier the main emphasis ...”

“... even if not, as the press handout bizarrely suggests, comparable to that of Edna O’Brien, Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark and Samuel Beckett (though I wish just for the sake of the gaiety of the nation that someone’s work was comparable with all those writers). The writing strains towards being very good, but is sabotaged by fear. Blackwood’s ...”

“... and masturbation scenarios. His narrators read Maurice Baring, A.C. Benson, Hopkins, Swinburne and Iris Murdoch. In Room Temperature, Mike takes a copy of Mark Pattison’s Isaac Casaubon to read on a plane; in the novel’s closing sentence he picks up a copy of the TLS. And on top of being a great observer and metaphor-maker – a poem on a magazine ...”

“... is always a significant question to ask about any philosopher: what is he afraid of?’ Iris Murdoch wrote in The Sovereignty of Good (1970). In Machery’s case, my guess is that he is afraid of wasting time. He wants philosophers to give up on questions they don’t know how to answer and take up questions they do. He thinks we should be in ...”

“... as far as it goes but too general to be revealing. The same could be said after all of Homer and Iris Murdoch. Dora tells us that Woolf’s childhood holidays in Cornwall, which inspired the setting of To the Lighthouse, belonged to an age of ‘elite seaside tourism’ that came to an end only in the 20th century with ‘the emergence of neo-Romantic ...”

“... about the television they were watching and the books they were reading. Lera: Françoise Sagan, Iris Murdoch, Susan Hill, John Updike (‘pointless’), Evelyn Waugh (‘black and unreadable’), Yuri Trifonov, the Kyrgyz author Chinghiz Aitmatov, books on yoga. Harold: mostly 19th-century classics, but also ‘one modern book a week’. The families ...”

“... in rather a gingerly way the grapes we placed between them.’ Like John Bayley in his memoir of Iris Murdoch, and many other people who have been close to dementia, Miller wonders whether it’s catching. It isn’t, of course, but in such an intimate relationship, where after five decades neither person would be what they are had it not been for the ...”

“... that poetry ‘was perfectly capable of saving us’, while an English lineage from Henry James to Iris Murdoch discovered in the novel the quintessentially ethical form which would transfigure the whole concept of morality, shifting it from Kant to Kafka, from obedience to a code to the texture and quality of lived experience. It is art which will now ...”

“... a book on the Modern Novel. ‘I have to watch the talented but lightweight Spark and the absurd Iris Murdoch (The Unicorn, God help us!) getting everything.’ She was attentive to the modern but some rigidity or opacity meant that she was not a writer of the Modern Novel. She was not going to interrogate her own imperatives, methods or psyche. She ...”

“... unassuming and amusing and most of us enjoy this kind of fun.’ Talk about faint praise. At least Iris Murdoch could see what the fuss was about. For her, the novel was an early touchstone. She wrote to Queneau: ‘Translating this little piece of Pierrot I felt such a feeling of joy and triumph – it is a clue, I can see the road more clearly, I can ...”

“... confuse the trail just as much. Someone at Century thought it worth getting Graham Greene and Iris Murdoch to write them, and both have come up with deadweight little bits. Greene: ‘The reader will be well rewarded by a strange experience.’ Murdoch: ‘It is essentially about love of art as a spiritual ...”