A Writer at War: Letters and Diaries of Iris Murdoch 1939-45

Iris Murdoch: A Writer at War is a fascinating private memoir of one of the great women writers and thinkers of the 20th century and a remarkable historical document of life behind the scenes during the Second World War.

Peter J Conradi is an author and journalist, known as the official biographer of Iris Murdoch, whose essays and letters he also collected and edited, in separate volumes. He is the author of many books including: A Dictionary of Interesting and Important Dogs (2019), Family Business: A Memoir (2019), and A Very English Hero: The Making of Frank Thompson (2012). He has written or reviewed for the TLS, New Statesman, FT, Spectator, Independent and The Guardian. Conradi has co-edited since 2007 the Transactions of the Radnorshire Society and is a Trustee of the Bleddfa Centre for the Creative Spirit.

These collected writings, never published before, comprise a diary which Iris Murdoch kept in her last summer at Oxford, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, and her wartime correspondence with the poet Frank Thomson and diplomat David Hicks. They reveal the young writer at her sprightly, original best - as gripped by her own affairs, and those of her friends and peers, as by the great affairs of the world; exuberant when in love, and yet remarkably philosophical even when love goes painfully wrong. A Writer at War is a treasury of one of the great women writers and thinkers of the 20th century - a fascinating private memoir which sheds new light on a brilliant mind in development, but also a remarkable historical document of life behind the scenes during the Second World War.

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