Like many other young people of my generation, I read each of Iris Murdoch's early novels as they appeared with pleasure and some admiration. Her date of birth was 1919 and mine was 1934, so that she was some 15 years older than I — the right age to be a mentor, and also old enough to have had a very different experience of the Second World War. For me it had been bombing raids, food rationing, news bulletins and a disrupted early schooling. For her it meant going straight from Plato, Aristotle and the Oxford "Greats' course into the civil service, and then into engaging with the devastated condition of mainland Europe. Like her Oxford contemporary Mary Warnock, she helped herself to digest that experience by writing an early book on Sartre.¹