If even a dog's tooth is truly worshipped it glows with light. The venerated object is endowed with power, that is the simple sense of the ontological proof. And if there is art enough a lie can enlighten us as well as the truth. What is the truth anyway, that truth? As we know ourselves we are fake objects, fakes, bundles of illusions. Can you determine exactly what you felt or thought or did?

In a BBC Radio 4 discussion of Murdoch and her work in 2009 Wilson assented to Bidisha's view that Murdoch's philosophical output consisted of nothing but "GCSE-style" essays on Plato and even suggested that Murdoch's later philosophical work "Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals" was a mistake that precipitated Murdoch into Alzheimers. Wilson's record that Murdoch regretted the sympathetic portrayal of the Irish nationalist cause Iris Murdoch had given earlier in The Red and the Green and a competing defence of the book at Caen in 1978. N.

Her first publiIris Murdochd novel Under the Net was selected in 1998 as one of Modern Library's 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. In 1987 Iris Murdoch was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.