the most enjoyable and interesting of Iris Murdoch's recent books". On the other hand, writing in The Times, Nuala O'Faolain objected to an absence of sympathetic characters, while in The Washington Post Joyce Carol Oates found the characters "vacuous". The literary critic and Murdoch biographer Peter J. Conradi describes A Fairly Honourable Defeat as a "brilliant and decisive masterpiece", and the novel with which she entered a "new artistic maturity" in which plot and characters are equally balanced. Literary scholars have examined various aspects of the novel, including its attempt to portray, in Tallis, an "interesting" good character, and its sympathetic depiction of a loving and stable homosexual relationship only three years after the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 decriminalized private sexual acts between adult men. In 2010 A Fairly Honourable Defeat was one of the 21 novels on the long list for the Lost Man Booker Prize, but it did not appear on the short list of six from which the winner was chosen. In 2022 British religious scholar Karen Armstrong said she left a book club when its members dismissed the novel as "evil." References Further reading 1970 British novels Novels by Iris Murdoch Chatto & Windus books Novels set in London