A brilliant, controversial and insightful biography from the author of the universally acclaimed The Victorians. A.N. Wilson’s tutor at Oxford was John Bayley, and it was there that Wilson met Irish Murdoch. He remained a close friend of them both, and it was at Iris’s pleading in 1988 that he agreed to write her biography. The biography was bound to be controversial, and Wilson pulls no punches in his attack on Bayley’s own book on Iris and the portrayal of her as an Alzheimer’s victim. Instead, he gives us back the fiercely intelligent novelist and philosopher, and shows us a relationship that was deeply loving yet profoundly eccentric, and very unconventional for its day. From the Hardcover edition.