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Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince (Penguin, 1973)

Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince (Penguin, 1973)

Purely by accident I have recently read three books published in 1973, two by Murdoch (she was quite prolific) and one by Gordimer (see entries for November 2012). All three novels are strongly shaped by the politics of their time, in Murdoch’s case the politics of gender relations, and in Gordimer’s the politics of African […]

Meaghan Delahunt, In the Blue House (Bloomsbury, 2001)

Meaghan Delahunt, In the Blue House (Bloomsbury, 2001)

This book is magical, and I found it gripping.  The now-standard feminist insight that “the personal is political” is given voice in this beautiful work.  Ranging from the cold Kremlin bedroom of a brutal Stalin to the warm courtyard of Frieda Kahlo and Diego Rivera’s Blue House in Mexico, the spaces of this novel are […]