Description: Praise for Iris Murdoch and A Severed Head : "Murdoch was the rare kind of great, buoyant, confident writer who could drive the whole machine. She was as in touch with animal instincts as intellectual ones. The scope of her vision makes you feel, when you are close to her fiction, that you have glimpsed the sublime." --Dwight Garner, The New York Times "One of the great novels about the unknowability of others . . . Like a small diamond full of inclusions, it paradoxically depicts human life at its most crystallized and muddied." -- The Millions "Combined a kind of dark mythological bent with a cerebral, talkative, psychologically misguided set of characters . . . Murdoch's prose is elegant, validating itself by its own certainty." --Susan Scarf Merrell, The New York Times "In my late teens, A Severed Head and The Bell opened my eyes to another world. I took them as a rather elegant form of social realism, and I loved the new world they opened up to me." --Mary Beard, Times Literary Supplement "Beautifully and wittily written . . . [Murdoch is] a poetic novelist of great gifts." --Walter Allen, The New York Times "The is a comedy with that touch of ferocity about it which makes for excitement." --Elizabeth Jane Howard "Immensely readable . . . Miss Murdoch is blessedly clever withour any of the aridity which, for some reason, that word is supposed to imply." --Philip Toynbee

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