Manipulating masterfully, Miss Murdoch turns out a deft three-in-one book: a sort of combined superior soap opera… a British novel of sensibility, and philosophical inquiry into reality
Time
I suspect that when the intellectual map of our own times comes to be sketched out, Iris Murdoch will occupy a position analogous to Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky... Murdoch writes better than anyone about the condition of being love: both the ecstatic joys of it and its capacity to turn otherwise decent individuals into monsters of selfishness and cruelty... Her vision of the world is heart-rending, but ultimately celebratory
- A N Wilson,