Iris Murdoch’s philosopher was losing his words back in 1983 | Letters

You report (21 February) on research suggesting that Iris Murdoch’s use of language in later works such as Jackson’s Dilemma (1995) might be an indication of the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. But I wonder whether Murdoch suspected a problem far earlier than it could become manifest to readers of her books. In The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983), the ageing philosopher, John Robert Rozanov, deplores his own increasing loss of control over language, a problem that is not,