In a letter to her friend Raymond Queneau in 1946, the twenty-seven-year-old Iris Murdoch asked, ‘Can I really exploit the advantages (instead of suffering the disadvantages) of having a mind on the border of philosophy, literature and politics?’ Well known as a philosopher and a novelist, Murdoch is less likely to be thought of as a political writer, though Gary Browning claims it to be the ‘simple truth’.

Browning is the ideal person to investigate this question, as a noted Murdoch scholar, admirer of her literary and philosophical writings, and political scientist. He states from the outset that politics, for Murdoch, ‘is not a dispensable discrete interest, but is an integral aspect of experience’. She was an inveterate crosser of borders, interested in all the arts, in philosophy, and certainly in politics. How she expressed these interests depended largely on whether she was writing fiction, poetry, plays, essays, philosophy, or letters.