Word: murdoch
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Iris Murdoch (A Severed Head) has put readers on warning that novels by Oxford philosophy dons are apt to baffle as well as entertain. The same warning applies to Accident, by Nicholas Mosley (who is, coincidentally, the son of Sir Oswald Mosley, former chief of the British Union of Fascists), which is about an Oxford philosophy don, and which raises the art of the intellectual tease to the level of mild torture. There is no doubt that in Accident a fictional design of subtlety and distinction has been attempted. But it is a literary jigsaw puzzle with perhaps some extra...
...nursery chair, designed by London Royal College of Art Graduate Peter Murdoch, is now on sale at Bloomingdale's, Neiman-Marcus and some 20 specialty shops. Made by the International Paper Co., the cylindrical-shaped chair consists of five layers of paper coated with a thin layer of plastic, is only one-sixteenth of an inch thick and weighs an incredibly light 3 Ibs. The chair will support up to 500 Ibs. Designer Murdoch claims that it is almost impossible to break. The throw-away price...
From the time she first set up shop as a novelist eleven years ago, Irish-born Iris Murdoch was accorded a respectful acclaim. Because she was then a philosophy don at Oxford, nobody seemed overly concerned about whether her fiction writing was good or bad; as with Dr. Johnson's famous walking dog, there was only a happy wonderment that she did it at all. Because her prose was lucid, and sometimes even poetic, it was assumed that she deliberately kept her meanings opaque, and she was credited with a sense of mysticism. Because her characters usually were unbelievably...
...wares. In writing a story of an Irish family during the tense week before the abortive Easter rising in 1916, she is perfectly at home with her surroundings and impressively knowledgeable about her history and the Irish character. The plot, if there is one, is not important, and Author Murdoch does not make the mistake of trying to make it so. The uprising fails somewhat comically, and nothing is changed much-not even the family caught...
...Author Murdoch is at her best when she delves into the Irish temperament, with its prudery, touchiness and vulgarity, and she displays poetic gifts approaching genius when she dwells lovingly on the sights and sounds of Dublin or describes the peculiar quality of Irish rain. But as usual, she comes a cropper with her characters. They are all, it seems, sexually confused, tortured by unexplained feelings of guilt, and totally ineffectual and unbelievable as human beings. An improbable seduction scene, which is the high point of the book, has all the furtive comings and goings but none of the hilarity...