Iris 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 entertainment and as important fictions in the Anglo-Russian tradition, and not as disguised philosophy.

This new edition, fully revised and updated, is issued to coincide with Peter Conradi's authorised biography Iris Murdoch.

"Brilliant"
NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

"[This] excellent and distinguished book had considerable influence on my own thinking."
MALCOLM BRADBURY

"In my view, the best work on her novels and thought now in print. [Conradi] reads her novels both wisely and attentively, ranges widely round them; his study of her Platonism is both just and rigorous."
A.S. BYATT (1990)

"Peter Conradi is uniquely qualified to accompany the reader in a discovery of one of the twentieth century's most remarkable novelists and thinkers."
John Bayley

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 recognizable 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 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.

Peter Conradi is 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 will be a superlative biography it will also be a superb history of a generation whohave profoundly influenced our world today.

How do you 'prepare' for bereavement? Religious faith can help, as can ritualised codes of dress and behaviour that recognise different stages of mourning. But many of us feel singularly unprepared when we lose someone. No one 'theory' can sooth the bereaved, precisely because grief so strips us naked and profoundly wounds us. Nothing pre-cooked helps. No quick fix, no one-shot deal. In this inspirational book, Peter J Conradi draws on literature, history and philosophy to present a broad array of different voices and perspectives on grief. His carefully chosen stories, excerpts and poems offer wisdom and consolation, but they also make us think, break down taboos and sometimes even find humour and light amidst the painful, bewildering reality of death. Everyone's experience of grief is different, but reading of the myriad different ways in which others have approached it can, while not necessarily easing our grief, certainly help us feel less alone.

Tin Tin's Snowy, Odysseus's Argos, Darwin's Polly, Mary Queen of Scots's 22 lap-dogs, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Flush... Behind every great man or woman is a dog. A Dictionary of Interesting and Important Dogs is a rich compendium of the world's most significant and beloved dogs. Embracing the intriguing and the provocative, the essential and the trivial, Peter J. Conradi forays into history, literature and personal anecdotes to unearth a treasure trove of canine characters. Discover the stories behind Karl Marx's and his daughter's Dogberry Club; the lapdogs who were secreted in first-class cabins on the Titanic and how they survived; Edinburgh's Greyfriars Bobby who stayed by his master's grave for 14 years; and the one undisputed fact about Shakespeare - his singular dislike for dogs. A Dictionary of Interesting and Important Dogs is a wonderful and witty homage to man's most faithful friend.

These never before published writings comprise Iris Murdoch's passionate wartime correspondence with two early intimates: the poet Frank Thompson, brother of the historian E.P. Thompson, who was killed in 1944, and David Hicks, with whom she had a dramatic affair, engagement, and breakup. It also includes the journal that Murdoch kept as a touring actress during August of 1939. The selection sheds new light on a brilliant young mind ("sharp and polished as a sword" as Frances Wilson describes it), while painting a vivid picture of life during the Second World War.

"There would be no need to complain of literary biographies...if they were all as good as Conradi's."—John Updike, The New Yorker

Iris: A Life of Iris Murdoch is already regarded as the standard, authorized biography of one of the most important female novelists and thinkers of the twentieth century. Three years after her death, Iris Murdoch has begun to fascinate a whole new generation of readers, and a movie about her life was released in early 2002. In this critically acclaimed biography, Peter Conradi assesses the intellectual and cultural legacy of a remarkable woman "at the center of our culture" (A. S. Byatt). Published in hardcover as Iris Murdoch: A Life. 32 pages of b/w photographs.

"Conradi's infectious fascination with Murdoch and stirring insights into her work make this a superb cornerstone biography. (Booklist starred review)

"A marvel of sympathy and intelligence."—Washington Post

"Murdoch herself comes alive in all her contradictions."—Commonweal

"A groundbreaking volume to which future biographers of Murdoch will be deeply indebted."—Choice

These collected writings present the early life of Iris Murdoch whilst she was at university in Oxford just before the start of the Second World War. They shed light on the development of one of the greatest female writers of the 21st century, as well as portraying life behind the scenes during the war.