SCOUT· 36%1h 11m·2026-01-27·Arts CultureThe Sacred and Profane Love Machine by Iris Murdoch
Ian Patterson, author of Books: A Manifesto , returns to Backlisted for a joyful discussion of Iris Murdoch and her sixteenth novel The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974), the winner of the Whitbread literary award for fiction. For reasons that will be obvious, the talk soon turns to other novels by Murdoch,…
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What people are saying
“a friend of mine told me of her shes awsome”
“Enjoyed this book a lot. But The Black Prince is her masterpiece imo.”
“A Fairly Honourable Defeat is the best one! I am sentimental about A Word Child as it was the first Iris Murdoch novel I read. I lived in London for six months in the 1980’s, I was aware of her and bought it at a book shop based on the plot…”
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