Iris was never physically robust — she suffered all her life from asthma, Ménière’s disease (tinnitus, deafness, giddiness) and arthritis — and she identified with those who died young. Her first great love was Frank Thompson (elder brother of E.P. Thompson), whom she had hoped to marry until he was captured, tortured and executed by the Nazis. War and Holocaust, indeed, overshadowed her intellectual life almost as much as those who had lost family and homeland. She spent a year working with displaced persons for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in Belgium and Austria from 1945-46 — an experience that left her shattered but also exhilarated. Among many lovers, the next man she hoped to marry was the anthropologist and poet Franz Baermann Steiner, who died suddenly in 1952, at 43 of a heart attack after an intense but chaste eight-month relationship. Steiner had established himself in Oxford, but had lost the manuscript of his magnum opus on the sociology of slavery at Reading railway station (an episode Iris reworked in one of her novels). Through him she was introduced to oriental religion, to the world of Kafka’s Prague, of Jewish mysticism and Zionism, but also to the reality of evil. Steiner’s family had perished in Treblinka and for her, “Franz was certainly one of Hitler’s victims.” His asceticism and precarious hold on life attracted Iris, and his posthumous book Taboo, a minor classic, displays the rare quality of his intellect.

But it was Elias Canetti, Steiner’s friend from Vienna, who would exercise a lasting hold over her literary imagination and as he comforted her in mourning for her beloved Steiner, she fell under the spell of his hortative yet seductive personality. Her letters to Canetti are those of a pupil to a master, quite unlike any others that she wrote, for in general she felt herself fully equal to her male friends, even if they were older. Canetti claims that he never answered her letters; he made her adopt a secret code if she wished to call him, and generally forced her to dance to his tune. In his memoir Party im Blitz (Party in the Blitz), published only after both of them were dead, Canetti makes it clear that their relationship — “an embarrassingly one-sided affair” — was all about power. He forced her to abandon the Christianity to which she had returned. In 1954, Canetti forbade her to have sex with her latest conquest, John Bayley, whom she would marry two years later. His descriptions of her appearance, her lovemaking, even her hospitality, ooze with condescension, indeed malice. Her only virtue, in his eyes, was to be a good listener, but even this back-handed compliment was double-edged: “She kept her piratical nature well hidden but was out to rob each of her lovers, not of his heart but of his intellect.” He saw her as a cross between an Oxford don and a vampire; she saw him as a sorcerer, but a dangerous one to his circle of apprentices. Though she never belonged to Canetti’s Hampstead Kreis — modelled on that of his hero, Karl Kraus, in 1920s Vienna — she observed his manipulative magnetism at work. In a late letter to Michael Hamburger, she declared: “Canetti is not anywhere in my novels, by the way! I would not want to ‘copy’ people, I invent them.” And yet from the character Mischa Fox in The Flight from the Enchanter onwards, Canetti’s presence haunts her fiction. Despite immortalising him, she aroused his literary envy as well as his sexual jealousy. Canetti even turned the fact that she was prolific against her: “I consider her as, so to speak, an ‘illegitimate’ writer. She never had to suffer for having to write.” Her fluency and success must have contrasted painfully with his own lack of either.