Education doesn't make you happy. And what is freedom? We don't become happy just because we are free, if we are. Or because we have been educated, if we have. But because education may be the means by which we realize we are happy. It opens our eyes, our ears. Tells use where delights are lurking. Convinces us that there is only one freedom of any importance whatsoever: that of the mind. And give us the assurance, the confidence, to walk the path our mind, our educated mind, offers.

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.