Iris Murdoch

Think yourself better: 10 rules of philosophy to live by

From Aristotle to Iris Murdoch: what the greatest minds of the past 2,500 years have to tell us about the good life

Julian Baggini
Saturday 4 February 2023

The thing that separates human beings from other animals is our extraordinary capacity for complex, abstract thought. This is what has given rise to our diverse cultures, our scientific achievements, our ability to envisage the future and, hopefully, make it better than what has gone before. But our imperfect minds have also generated terrible mistakes and dangerous ideologies. If we don’t know how to distinguish bad thinking from good, we can end up believing what we shouldn’t, and behaving in ways that are harmful to ourselves, to others, and to the planet.

Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life – review

 

Iris Murdoch

BOOK OF THE DAY

Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life – review

Ideas are a little submerged by biography – and soft furnishings – in this account of how Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, Mary Midgley and Philippa Foot sought to refute logical positivism in wartime Oxford

Andrew Anthony

Tue 8 Feb 2022 07.00 GMT

Few people read books about philosophy nowadays, if they ever did, but there is a larger audience for books about philosophers. One of the more successful examples in this flourishing genre was David Edmonds’s and John Eidinow’s Wittgenstein’s Poker, published in 2001, which examined a brief and tense meeting between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper that took place in Cambridge in 1946.

Iris Murdoch

 

Metaphysical Animals review – four women who changed philosophy

How Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot and Mary Midgley arrived at a radically new philosophical approach

Aniel Gomes

Thursday 10 February 2022

Metaphysical Animals is both story and argument. The story is a fine one. Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot and Mary Midgley were students at Oxford during the second world war. They found a world in which many of the men were absent. Those who remained were either too old or too principled to fight. It was a world, as Midgley later put it, where women’s voices could be heard.

Secret lives … Iris Murdoch in 1978. Photograph: Jane Bown

Iris Murdoch at 100: ‘Her books are full of passion and disaster’

Love, sadness, fear, lust, power ... Murdoch’s strange, radical novels seethe with emotion. On her centenary, they are inspiring a new generation of authors

Alex Clark
Sat 13 Jul 2019 12.01 BST

Do Iris Murdoch’s novels still matter to people? Or, after the high-water mark of her Booker-winning 1978 novel, The Sea, The Sea, and a late period of longer, more philosophically abstruse books, did her work collapse into her biography – the jumble of love affairs, absurdly messy kitchens and Alzheimer’s disease that were dramatised by Kate Winslet and Judi Dench in the 2001 film of her life? And, once the attention paid to her life had abated, had contemporary fiction simply moved on?

Sinéad O'Connor

We talked to the early hours and found ourselves falling in love: my year with Sinéad O’Connor

I bumped into her in a London pub and it felt like we were old friends. We spent more time watching Father Ted than talking about her music

John Brice
Friday 28 July 2023

I

t was summer 97, a beautiful warm evening. I was working in A&R at Warners, driving to a gig in west London, Sinéad was outside a pub with a couple of friends and we locked eyes and she waved. I’d met her a couple of times before but we’d never really chatted. I popped in, got us a drink and it was like we were old friends. She was wearing baggy torn jeans and a white vest, her beauty was captivating but in no way intimidating, she exuded warmth and kindness. We talked about Abba and what we listened to in our teens. She loved me telling her about all the early Smiths gigs in Manchester. I never made the gig that night. We would instead sit on her sofa and talk until the early hours and soon found ourselves falling in love.

Audrey Tautou: 'There is no room for poetry in Thérèse's world'

The French actor tells Catherine Shoard why she swerved away from sweetness to play a gritty, troubled heiress in the 1920s

• 
• • Catherine Shoard
  • The Guardian, Thursday 6 June 2013 18.00 BST
  • 
    

Audrey Tautou plays against type in her new film Thérèse Desqueyroux

Meeting Room F in the basement of Toronto's Hyatt Regency hotel has no windows. It has coffee and cookies and the groggy chuckle of an extractor fan. It is 11am at the fag-end of last autumn's film festival. In the corner is a whiteboard in search of a mantra, and a big bin.

 

Life Lessons from River Phoenix

By Interview

Photographed by Bruce Weber

August 23, 2021

Welcome to Life Lessons. This week, we honor River Phoenix on what would have been the actor’s 51st birthday by revisiting his November ’91 cover story conversation with his close friend—and My Own Private Idaho co-star— Keanu Reeves. So sit back and soak up the ’90s nostalgia—you just might learn a thing or two.

Life Lessons from Robert De Niro

By Interview

August 17, 2021

Welcome to Life Lessons. This week, to mark the 78th birthday of the notoriously sphinx-like Robert De Niro, we revisit some memorable quotes from his November ’93 cover story. So sit back and dust off your Italian accent—you just might learn a thing or two.

Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren in The Duchess of Malfi at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester. 

Bob Hoskins remembered by Helen Mirren

26 October 1942–29 April 2014
Helen Mirren, who first worked with Bob Hoskins on The Long Good Friday, recalls a vital presence, a magnetic actor fizzing with energy, and a true mensch

• Lauren Bacall remembered by Terry Hands

Helen Mirren
Sunday 21 December 2014 09.00 GMT

There is a great Yiddish word, a mensch. It means a stand-up guy, someone to rely upon, someone who won’t let you down. Bob Hoskins was just that, a mensch.

‘She trembled with the truths she had to tell’: Sinéad O’Connor by friends, fans and collaborators

Sinéad O'Connor

 

‘She trembled with the truths she had to tell’: Sinéad O’Connor by friends, fans and collaborators

Neil Jordan, Róisín Murphy, MC Lyte, Anne Enright and more share their memories of a uniquely talented, uncompromising artist, mother and ‘Celtic warrior’

by Ben Beaumont-Thomas, Sian Cain and Laura Snapes
Thursday 27 July 2023

‘She was very beautiful and very wild’

Anne Enright, author

Sinéad O’Connor was a daughter, a mother and a sister, she made a family that brought many people into its extended web of care, one that included the fathers of her four adored children. So when the world mourns an iconic talent and a great star, people in Dublin think about those caught up in her astonishing life story who are now bereaved. All these people joined in the battle for Sinéad’s mental health and worked for the protection and wellbeing of her children, and all of them, including Sinéad, contended with the distorting power that fame brought to her life. It was not easy. Somewhere in there, beyond the huge talent and huge difficulty, beyond public adoration and vilification, the ardent and anguished connection she felt with her fans, was the hope that her great heart and searching wit would bring her through. She was very beautiful and very wild, and she trembled with the truths she had to tell. Sinéad’s grief at the loss of her son was hard to witness and her loss will spark difficulties in many people. Before we turn her into a rock’n’roll saint and lift her image even further from the real, let’s check in with each other and lift the sadness where we can. It’s what she would have wanted. There was none like her. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a h-anam dílis (May her faithful soul be at the right hand of God).

 

Sinéad O'Connor
by Philip Burke

Controversy never drowned out the astonishing songcraft of Sinéad O’Connor

As well as being a fearless interpreter of others’ work, the late singer adapted to a seemingly endless array of styles, marking her out as a bold and utterly singular artist

Alexis Petridis
Wednesday 26 July 2023

Almost from the moment Sinéad O’Connor appeared in the mass public consciousness, she created controversy: her first release, a song called Heroine co-written with U2’s guitarist the Edge for the soundtrack to a largely forgotten 1986 film called Captive, was swiftly followed by the singer causing a furore by expressing her support for the IRA. Years later, she described her comments as “bollocks”, but further uproar would surround O’Connor on a regular basis: about her conversion to Islam (she called non-Muslims “disgusting”); about Prince, the author of her biggest hit, 1990’s Nothing Compares 2 U, whom she accused of physical abuse; and, most notably, about sexual abuse in the Catholic church, a subject which she took up long before it became a mainstream talking point.

 

Sinéad O’Connor, gifted and provocative Irish singer, dies at 56

O’Connor, who began her musical career singing on the streets of Dublin, was a star from her 1987 debut album ‘The Lion and the Cobra’

London

July 26, 2023

Sinéad O’Connor, the gifted Irish singer-songwriter who became a superstar in her mid-20s but was known as much for her private struggles and provocative actions as for her fierce and expressive music, has died at 56.

Obituaries / Sinéad O'Connor

Sinéad O'Connor

 

Sinéad O’Connor obituary

Singer who shot to global superstardom with a song by Prince, Nothing Compares 2 U, one of the biggest-selling singles of 1990

By her own account, the childhood of the musician Sinéad O’Connor, who has died aged 56, was more than usually difficult: her parents split when she was young and, against her wishes, she was sent to live with her mother, who she said physically abused her and encouraged her to shoplift. The stealing led to the 14-year-old Sinéad spending 18 months at a training centre that had previously been one of Dublin’s notorious church-affiliated Magdalene laundries.

Sinéad O'Connor

‘No one knew what to do’: when Sinéad O’Connor ripped up the pope’s photo on TV – the inside story

Record label executive Daniel Glass remembers the infamous 1992 SNL appearance that resulted in the artist becoming ‘totally cancelled’

Daniel Glass, as told to Laura Snapes

Tuesday 27 July 2023

At the record label Chrysalis in New York, we had a Wednesday marketing meeting every week. I was a young executive and the president came in and said, “I just came back from England and we signed a super talent.” I think she was 19 – it was Sinéad. This was before she shaved her head. When we heard [debut album] The Lion and the Cobra it was one of the greatest meetings I’ve ever attended – it was staggering, this record. It came out and we promoted it in a very unorthodox way. The key was getting it to go up the American college media charts, which it did and we took it to No 1. There were remixes of Mandinka and various other records – we had an MC Lyte version of I Want Your (Hands on Me).

 

Monica Jones clung to the affair with Philip Larkin, 'however galling the compromises on offer'. The pair pictured here in Scotland CREDIT: Hull University Archives/ Hull History Centre/ Philip Larkin estate/Society of Authors

The miserable life of Larkin’s mistress, kept on tap for kinky sex and holidays

Using unpublished letters, John Sutherland's book Monica Jones, Philip Larkin and Me reveals the tragic squandering of a brilliant woman

Rupert Christiansen

25 April 2021

“Iam simply ridiculous – a reject, an incapable” wrote Monica Jones in 1955. This wasn’t a passing moment of hysterical despair: over her entire adult life, she would refer to herself as “the old bag”, an “ordinary little worm” or “a dull unleavened lump” in self-lacerating recognition that her existence was a pathetic flop. And that is how posterity is in danger of picturing Philip Larkin’s mistress: a harpy in horn-rimmed spectacles who drank and shouted and made a fool of herself in an increasingly desperate campaign to keep hold of the man she loved.

Letters to Monica by Philip Larkin / Reviews

• 
  
  

  Letters to Monica 

• 
  

• Letters to Monica by Philip Larkin

  edited by Anthony Thwaite

  Faber, pp. 475

They were ‘soulmates’ according to people who knew both of them.

They were ‘soulmates’ according to people who knew both of them. The word has a double-edged quality; it may suggest that they got on well together because they presented such a problem to everyone else. Both Philip Larkin and Monica Jones found it difficult to suffer fools gladly, and in this collection of letters (ranging from 1946-84) from Larkin to his long-term companion and lover, the mean-spirited and misanthropic are given full rein.