When Iris Murdoch returned to Oxford in the autumn of 1948 to take up a fellowship at St Anne’s College, after a brief sojourn in Cambridge where she’d gone with the intention of beginning a PhD on Edmund Husserl, she found herself at the centre of the English-speaking philosophical world. The years after the Second World War were a sort of golden age for philosophy in this country, and the discipline flourished especially by the banks of the Isis, under the aegis of two men in particular – J L Austin and Gilbert Ryle.

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