Dimensions
129 x 198 x 44mm
A full and revealing biography of one of the century's greatest English writers and an icon to a generation.
Dame Iris Murdoch has played a major role in English life for nearly half a century. As a novelist, as a thinker, and as a private individual, her life has significance for our age. There is a recognisable Murdoch world, and the adjective "Murdochian" has entered the language to describe situations where a small group of people interacting intricately and strangely.
Her story is as emotionally fascinating as that of Virginia Woolf, but far less well-known; hers has been an adventurous, highly eventful life, a life of phenomenal emotional and intellectual pressures, and her books portray a real world which is if anything toned down as well as mythicised.
For Iris's formative years, astonishingly, movingly and intimately documented by Conradi's meticulous research, were spent among the leading European and British intellectuals who fought and endured the Second World War, and her life, like her books, was full of the most extraordinary passions and profound relationships with some of the most inspiring and influential thinkers, artists, writers and poets of that turbulent time and after.
Using vast resources in diaries and papers and Iris's friends' recollections, this is a superlative biography and a superb history of a generation who have profoundly influenced our world today.
