At present great importance is attached to the teaching of foreign languages. No doubt, it happens not without purpose

Works

Fiction

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  1964 – The Shadow of the Sun, Chatto & Windus
  
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  1967 – The Game, Chatto & Windus
  
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  1978 – The Virgin in the Garden, Chatto & Windus
  
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  1985 – Still Life, Chatto & Windus
  
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  1990 – Possession: A Romance, Chatto & Windus
  
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  1992 – Angels and Insects, Chatto & Windus
  
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  1996 – Babel Tower, Chatto & Windus
  
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  2000 – The Biographer's Tale, Chatto & Windus
  
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  2002 – A Whistling Woman, Chatto & Windus
  
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  2009 – The Children's Book, Chatto & Windus
  
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  2011 – Ragnarok: The End of the Gods, Canongate ISBN 9780802120847
  

Short story collections

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  1987 Sugar and Other Stories, Chatto & Windus
  
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  1993 The Matisse Stories, Chatto & Windus
  
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  1994 The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, Chatto & Windus
  
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  1998 Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice, Chatto & Windus
  
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  2003 Little Black Book of Stories, Chatto & Windus
  

Essays and biographies

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  1965 Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch, Chatto & Windus
  
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  1989 Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge, Poetry and Life, Hogarth Press
  
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  1991 Passions of the Mind: Selected Writings, Chatto & Windus
  
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  1995 Imagining Characters: Six Conversations about Women Writers (with Ignes Sodre), Chatto & Windus
  
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  2000 On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays, Chatto & Windus
  
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  2001 Portraits in Fiction, Chatto & Windus
  
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  2016 Peacock & Vine: On William Morris and Mariano Fortuny, Knopf ISBN 978-1101947470
  

Texts edited

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  1970 Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time, Nelson
  
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  1976 Iris Murdoch: A Critical Study, Longman
  
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  1990 George Eliot: Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings (editor with Nicholas Warren), Penguin
  
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  1995 New Writing Volume 4 (editor with Alan Hollinghurst), Vintage
  
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  1997 New Writing Volume 6 (editor with Peter Porter), Vintage
  
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  1998 Oxford Book of English Short Stories (editor), Oxford University Press
  
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  2001 The Bird Hand Book (with photographs by Victor Schrager), Graphis Inc. (New York)