With Love and Rage. A Friendship with Iris Murdoch **first edition**

Murdoch's published writing spans over 40 years. Among the awards she received: The James Tait Memorial Prize, the Whitbread Literary Award and the Booker Prize. She enjoyed the unique achievement of being shortlisted for the Booker Prize no fewer than six times. March 2010. Murdoch fans have been eagerly awaiting David Morgan's memoir entitled With Love and Rage, newly published by Kingston University Press. Author's synopsis: Morgan met Iris Murdoch in the 1960s when he was studying at the Royal College of Art. This controversial new memoir is a frank account of a 30-year relationship with Iris Murdoch and details are revealed here for the first time. She is not thought of as a London figure but this is an irreverent yet tender picture of her from the London end. It describes how she came to teach at the Royal College of Art, got mixed up with a gang of art students, and ended up being dragged into their love-lives and troubles. Nothing has been exaggerated but it reads like a Murdoch novel with a crazy pairing up of characters and even a ‘severed-head tour of London. In one hallucinogenic sequence, the author even suspects that Iris herself - like one of the enchanter figures in her novels - may be pulling the strings to make it all happen. It is a story of the 1960s but it ends unmagically in the 1990s with harrowing descriptions of her Alzheimer’s - of pub meetings she began to forget to turn up for, and a final fumbling goodbye at Paddington when she no longer knew who he was. The pace is fast, the format unconventional. Much of it is in note-form, exactly as remembered, allowing the author to show Iris to the reader in a series of small lightning flashes which make her come alive on the page, although these flashes become almost too vivid to bear when applied to their last meetings. The book includes an astonishing series of love (and rage) letters to the author published for the first time, with several in her own handwriting. Critical reaction has been that it throws new light on her and her work, particularly on the way people and events in her life may have been used as source material in her writing.

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