In later years, Iris moved much further in Oakeshott’s direction. She was unimpressed by the radicalism of the 1960s and even more alarmed by the rise of Islamic radicalism after 1979. To the American literary critic Naomi Lebowitz, she came out with an extraordinary prophecy, while denouncing the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie:

The Muslims in this country (quite a substantial number of them) speak like savage madmen — I mean some of them do, and keep it up. All men speaking out and being photographed, of course, no women. They are constantly demanding Muslim schools, compulsory separation of women, teaching the Koran etc. They are quite unlike other persons from elsewhere. Perhaps Islam will conquer the whole planet in the next century. To think that the wicked old priest can condemn someone to death just by pointing at him — it’s a nightmare . . . It is a pity that Islam will now be hated in this country — including nice perhaps innocent shopkeepers etc. who just want to go on with their lives. But I exaggerate I daresay. Anyway it’s a rotten religion which owes much of its popularity to its absolute and fundamental degradation of women. Or expresses what (a large number of) men feel in their hearts.

It is remarkable that a woman whose mind was open to almost all spiritual ideas should have rejected Islam so vehemently — and yet have feared its ultimate triumph. Her life was devoted to the consolations of philosophy, but she yearned for something more. “Why do I want to write philosophy, why can’t I just forget it, what use is it anyway? I suppose it is a sort of addiction,” she wrote in her last letter to Brigid Brophy. “Is it philosophy, am I any good at it? Probably not.” To Sister Marian, she lamented “the loss of Christianity” among the young. “I think that Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism find it easier to handle what is holy, what is good — to keep it in a changing scene . . . We, who are not Jews etc. suffer from the awful crude clarities of the technological age.”

Iris never lost her own curiosity about the world but she missed such curiosity in the culture that was emerging. I shall always cherish a memory from the 1980s, before her mind became occluded by Alzheimer’s, of sitting with Iris and John, plus a couple of others, in a bleak hotel room with nothing but a bottle of sherry to keep us company. We talked about philosophy, politics, literature and life. She hated anything that sought to place limits on such conversation. Iris Murdoch’s letters are a testament to her determination not merely to lead the intellectual life but to enjoy it too.