In this 75th Episode Special, Miles is joined by Daniel Read (Kingston University, UK) to answer questions from the Iris Murdoch Society and via the social media channels.

You can find out much more, and join the society, here: www.irismurdochsociety.org.uk

The questions sent in are:

1. Could Iris Murdoch drive?

2. How should Murdoch’s philosophical seriousness be reassessed in light of recent scholarship on her as a public intellectual?

3. In what ways did Murdoch’s Irish background shape her imagination, ethics, and sense of exile or belonging?

4. How has Murdoch’s relationship with religion and the sacred been represented differently in scholarship versus media portrayals?

5. How should Murdoch’s private life—especially her complex relationships—be integrated (or resisted) in critical interpretations of her novels?

6. What is Murdoch’s place within post-war British women’s writing, and why has she often been treated as an exception rather than part of a continuum?

7. How do contemporary debates about feminism, agency, and power reframe Murdoch’s representation of women?

8. Murdoch insists on the reality of the Good as something external and authoritative.

How might that claim speak to contemporary moral and political life, where moral language is often treated as subjective or unstable?

9. Murdoch’s late novels are often described as difficult, bewildering, even radically alien.

How should we read the strangeness of the late Murdoch: as decline, experiment, or metaphysical intensification?

10. What do you think is the most important unfinished task for Murdoch scholarship today?