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 and letter for nearly half a century. As A.S.Byatt notes, she is -absolutely central to our culture-. 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 interract 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 Bri
