Читать книгу Iris Murdoch: A Life: The Authorized Biography - Peter Conradi J. - Страница 7

In November 1999 in Bulgaria, Philippa Foot, who had brought Iris the news of Frank Thompson’s murder in 1944, and I met Frank’s partisan General Trunski, fourteen days before his death. We also listened to Naku Staminov’s eye-witness account of Frank’s execution, and stood in silence by his grave. Philippa handed me a red carnation to leave there, as from Iris. I owe more than I can convey to John Bayley and Philippa Foot, whose roles in Iris’s story what follows makes clear. Each read the book in draft and saved me from errors. To both this book is dedicated.

^* She profited more from Andrew Harvey’s understanding of Buddhism (see Chapter 20).

^* Sydney Afriat saw her outside the Collège Franco-Brittanique in Paris in 1949. She was strikingly not as others are, with a straw-coloured fringe, not beautiful, immobile, having a quality of stillness. Three years later at St Anne’s he told her he’d seen her, with an older woman, and when and where. ‘Yes, that was my mother,’ IM replied without surprise. Such stories of strangers being struck by one sighting and remembering it are common.