Iris Murdoch’s Pocket History of the Five Phases of Freedom, in Literature and Life

“Freedom is our ability to rise out of history and grasp a universal idea of order which we then apply to the sensible world.”

“Nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom,” James Baldwin wrote in one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. At the same time, across the Atlantic, Iris Murdoch (July 15, 1919–February 8, 1999) was aiming her uncommonly penetrating intellect at the history of art — and literary art in particular, with its pinnacle in the novel — as an instrum...