Search Results

“... 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 ...”

“... to be tactful as well as tactile, which means having what Bunyan calls ‘honesty’ and what Iris Murdoch calls ‘love’, respecting the personality of the author and the characters that we find in literary texts. After lashing out like a prizefighter, he comes over all John Bayley. Another visit to the dictionary shows that ‘tact’ meaning ...”

“... at the series, now just for Macmillan. In time, the Aubrey-Maturin books became a cult property. Iris Murdoch and John Bayley were fans, and every now and then a laudatory notice would appear in the TLS or the LRB, for which O’Brian wrote in the 1980s and 1990s.*His life began to change in 1989. Starling Lawrence, an editor at W.W. Norton, read a ...”

“... it comes to postwar women writers, I would much rather read Beauvoir, McCarthy, Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch and Natalia Ginzburg. Paradoxically, Jefferson’s biography enabled me to see the anti-biography Sarraute as a unique voice rather than a member of a well-studied movement.My own literary sensibility has also changed. The last time I read ...”

“... psychogeography of the Iain Sinclair school.Waidner seems to be revisiting the distinction made by Iris Murdoch in Under the Net that some parts of London are necessary, others contingent. The ontological standing of Camden Town is high in Sterling Karat Gold, with the Fairfield and Three Fields estates glowing particularly brightly, but there are other ...”

“... of television broadcasts. I myself gave money to help buy newspaper space and persuaded Iris Murdoch to add her name to a petition: worthy gestures but hardly the politics of the street. Muffling the extremity of protest about Aids issues in Britain was trust in the NHS, a trust both justified and unjustified – in the early days there was ...”

“... escapes marriage to a beautiful socialite. The essay on dons’ fiction (in which he criticised iris Murdoch, the author then of just two novels, for writing books that were ‘almost entirely disorganised: a strange fault for a philosophy don’) attracted an angry response from John Wain, who had worked under Jeremy’s father at Reading, protesting ...”

“... a murky zone, where people are not entirely aware of themselves or of what they are pushing away. Iris Murdoch famously said that being a woman ‘is like being Irish … everyone says you’re important and nice, but you take second place all the time.’ I have spent most of my published life on predominantly male UK fiction lists. The best of them are ...”

“... exists both inside and outside these couples, but monogamy is not expected. When in the 1980s Iris Murdoch was asked whether the absence from her fiction of characters who took sex lightly indicated disapproval, or a sense that her plots wouldn’t work without a sense of commitment and consequence, she said it was both – a quaint attitude even ...”

“... into new territory, though of course they have previously been a couple. Interviewed in the 1980s, Iris Murdoch was asked if her novels could accommodate characters for whom sexual love was not a philosophically momentous business. She said not. Asked whether this was a matter of moral disapproval or because her plots required extremes of motivation, she ...”

“... the way humans can, if they exercise sufficient care and attention – perhaps of the sort that Iris Murdoch described as ‘a just and loving gaze directed on an individual reality’ – come to understand the needs, wants and preferences of a creature that does not share our language. It may be true, Bourke concedes, that we don’t know what ...”

“... under the headline ‘An Alleged Love Story’, Wilfred Sheed compared Purdy to ‘a down-at-heel Iris Murdoch, working seedier equations’. Sheed may have been thinking of The Bell (1958), in which the character of Michael refuses the love of Nick, despite returning it. Nick kills himself as a result. The moral logic of ...”

“... roil the works of Katherine Mansfield, Sylvia Plath, Daphne Du Maurier, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Jolley, Sybille Bedford and many others. Female autobiographers have been similarly forthright about such hatreds – if less so about the pleasures of posthumous retribution. When a famous and idealised older woman fails to live up ...”

“... in the drawings whereas in the paintings the hands become fat, boneless and almost claw-like.Dame Iris Murdoch dies and gets excellent reviews, all saying how (morally) good she was, though hers was not goodness that seemed to require much effort, just a grace she had been given; so she was plump and she was also good, both attributes she had been born ...”