Peter J Conradi

Back when he was studying English at UEA, Peter J Conradi had a friend who ran the student literary society, organizing writers to come to Norwich and speak. He went along to a meeting and the speaker there changed the whole course of his life. The writer was Iris Murdoch. She became a friend, and he became – in his words – her “disciple”, and eventually her biographer. And then Peter and his partner, Jim O’Neill, spent eight months caring for Iris at the end of her life, as Alzheimer's took hold – they listened to a lot of music together. Peter has spent his career as an English Professor at the University of Kingston and his biography of Iris Murdoch is not his only book: he’s also written about Dostoevsky, John Fowles, and Angus Wilson; about grief, about becoming a Buddhist, and about dogs.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Peter discusses the extraordinary power Iris Murdoch exerted over all her friends and lovers, and her secretiveness, so that each would be kept in a separate compartment. He remembers how she kept singing and dancing right up to the end. And he reveals his own mental health struggles, and how Buddhism has helped him. Music choices include Strauss, Bartok, Bach, Britten’s War Requiem, and the Anthem by Leonard Cohen that contains the famous words “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”

A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke