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One would never gather from Peter J. Conradi’s biography of Iris Murdoch that she was an intellectual founder of the New Left -- or that, well into her career at Oxford, she was co-teacher of a (very well-attended and utterly contentious) seminar on the Marxist concept of alienation. Her views of the human condition were no doubt rent by contradictions as well as discontinuities. She never sought refuge from history’s torments by constructing a private realm from which these were excluded. Rather, the agonies of her characters were an indelible fusion of the moral, personal and political -- like her own.
-- Norman Birnbaum, letter to the editor, NY Times Book Review
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