Letters and Diaries of Iris Murdoch 1939-45. Comprising a diary which Iris Murdoch kept in her last summer at Oxford, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, and her wartime correspondences with the poet Frank Thomson and diplomat David Hicks, 'A Writer at War' reveals the young Iris at her sprightly, original best - as gripped by her own affairs, and those of her friends and peers, as by the great affairs of the world; exuberant in love, and yet remarkably philosophical even when love goes painfully wrong. This is a fascinating private memoir, but also a remarkable historical document of life behind the scenes during the Second World War.