биографии и мемуары

культура и искусство

критика

Published to coincide with his major biography of Iris Murdoch, Peter Conradi’s acclaimed critical appreciation of her work is reissued in a fully revised and updated edition, with a foreword by John Bayley.‘Peter Conradi is uniquely qualified to accompany the reader in a discovery of one of the 20th-century’s most remarkable novelists and thinkers.’ John BayleyIris Murdoch, who died in 1999, was the author of twenty-six novels, including ‘The Bell’, ‘A Fairly Honourable Defeat’, ‘The Black Prince’ and the Booker Prize-winning ‘The Sea, The Sea’.In ‘The Saint and the Artist’, the only full critical examination of Murdoch’s work by a British critic, Peter Conradi, who knew her well, traces the way in which the zest and buoyant high spirits of her early novels gave way to a more deeply and darkly comic achievement in the novels of the 1970s, and in some from the last period. He suggests how her own life, wonderfully transmuted into high art, provided the raw material for her novels, and argues that they should be read as serious entertainments and as important fictions in the Anglo-Russian tradition, and not as disguised philosophy.

публицистическая литература

военное дело / спецслужбы

военная история

история войн

Первая мировая война

архивные материалы

воспоминания и мемуары

The Saint and Artist: A Study of the Fiction of Iris Murdoch

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 British intellectuals who fought and endured World War II, 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.Peter Conradi was very close to both Iris Murdoch and John Bayley, Iris’s husband, whose memoir of their life together has itself been the subject of an enormous amount of attention and acclaim. This will be an extraordinarily full biography, for there are vast resources in diaries and papers and friends’ recollections, and while it is a superlative biography it is also a superb history of a generation who have profoundly influenced our world today.

Peter J. Conradi