“... 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 ...”

“... many new definitions (e.g. Culture and Relativity), but when Columbia says that the novels of Iris Murdoch are ‘subtle, witty and convoluted’, it only changes ‘convoluted’ to ‘highly melodramatic’: and it crosses out the next phrase that they ‘have elicited varying critical reaction’. It finds no fault with Columbia’s long article ...”

“... dislocated and could no longer be relied on as a stable backing. The more adventurous of them (Iris Murdoch is another case in point) made a virtue of necessity and quite deliberately portrayed characters who seemed to be cut off from their roots, or to have no roots, or at least to have no assignable place in any recognisable social hierarchy. This ...”

“... among the writers associated with the more radical forms of ‘Post-Modernism’. John Fowles and Iris Murdoch are not discussed. Parrinder himself notes that ‘postmodernists such as Pynchon, Vonnegut, Brautigan, Barth and Barthelme’ are most usefully understood in relation to the revival of fantasy: but that is virtually the last we hear of them in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 (...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”