Magellan's Log: Iris Murdoch: Cleverer

Early, Murdoch announces the great bitter childish game of duplicity and linguistic sadism, the sorry fruit of class and talent, education and leisure, which filled and dominated English culture, fiction, theater, after World War II. She lays out the rules followed by all the time-bound, best-seller-listed, Booker-prized writers with much-praised bravura again and again to the absolute dead-end of perfect, suffocating, miserable self-involvement. She does this, laughing all the way. Only she, of the sorry crew, escapes.