Word: murdochs
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Fight or Fold. Some of Fleet Street's newer and more modern-minded proprietors, such as Canadian-born Thomson and Rupert Murdoch (TIME, Jan. 12, 1970), are trying to hold the line on budgets and resist union demands. Despite the folding of the Sketch, labor shows no signs of surrendering any of its prerogatives, even at the risk of putting thousands more out of work. Of the "popular" papers, the conservative Daily Express (circ. 3,500,000) and the pro-Labor Daily Mirror (circ. 4,500,000) remain profitable, although both have been losing readers lately to Murdoch...
...Severed Head leaps for the category and lands in the second. Novelist Iris Murdoch adapted her farce for the stage with wit and observation. Intelligence shone in scene. The film version, written by Frederic Raphael, transfers some of the but none of the craft. Instead, it presents a plot giggling at itself...
...FAIRLY HONOURABLE DEFEAT by Iris Murdoch. 436 pages. Viking...
Love has always been blind, but that does not appease the Iris Murdoch demon. Her 13 novels, written over 16 years, are cruel choreographies for lovers who must play a game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey in which there is no tail and no donkey. The grotesque charade is heightened by the fact that Murdoch's lovers are usually intellectuals, often philosophers or linguists, who can talk their way to "steamy moral altitudes" while betraying others and mortifying themselves...
Into this amicable stasis Murdoch introduces a favorite character of hers, the mean, mysterious catalyst. This time it is a famous scientist named Julius King, who is a latter-day lago, if not the Devil himself. Arriving in London and finding his friends happy is too much for Julius. Playing on vanity, sowing distrust he labors suavely to link Rupert with Hilda's younger sister and Simon with himself. As the plot unravels, the book shifts from comedy to melodrama, to tragedy-a course few writers could control or sustain. Miss Murdoch nearly manages it, because her presence...