I read with huge enjoyment all of Iris Murdoch’s later novels — onwards, I think, from Bruno’s Dream of 1970 — as they were published. Sometimes this was in order to review them. With the possible exception of 1973’s The Black Prince, with its intriguing engagement with Hamlet, none gave me greater pleasure than The Sea, The Sea, the deserved winner of the 1978 Booker Prize.

This, too, has clear associations with a Shakespeare play, The Tempest, with the Prospero-like (and in many ways unlike) central character and narrator, Charles Arrowby. Now in his 60s, the former star actor, playwright and theatrical impresario has abjured the magic of the stage to begin life by himself in a cottage by the sea, whose motion and magnificence are brilliantly conjured by Murdoch in prose that bears comparison to that of Virginia Woolf in The Waves.

While poetic in style, at times, the novel also possesses a powerful narrative drive.

Re-reading it for the first time on a recent holiday, I was surprised — and pleased — to discover what a page-turner it is. The action, I need hardly say, requires, as ever with this writer’s oeuvre, the reader’s full suspension of disbelief as we follow its characters through the familiar Murdochian torments of the heart.

Not the least appealing feature of the book for me is its preoccupation with food. In her review for the Oxford Mail on its publication, the shrewd and gifted writer Barbara Pym noted that the novel would supply fine material for anyone seeking to create simple, nourishing meals in, say, a bed-sitter. There is a marked (and endearing) eccentricity to some of the dishes which — while presented as if from the culinary repertoire of Arrowby — are clearly in the style served in the Oxford home of the novelist and her critic husband John Bayley. I don’t think I realised this when I first read the book, but I later came to know of the unusual catering arrangements in Charlbury Road both from Peter J. Conradi’s biography of Iris and the testimony of friends invited to dine there.

Arrowby’s dictums on food are set out in a forthright, even dogmatic, style, with the suggestion that he will brook no contradictions. Their flavour can be conveyed through a few quotations. Here, for example, are his thoughts on coffee (“It seems to me an inconvenient and much-overrated drink”), cheese (“of course I never touch foreign cheese”), bottled sauces (“only a fool despises tomato ketchup”) and kippers (“arguably better than smoked salmon unless the latter is very good”).

In the matter of coffee, Arrowby/Murdoch concedes that this is a matter of personal taste, before adding wittily: “Whereas other views which I hold on the subject of food approximate to absolute truth.”

The starting point for all discussion of its subject is its recognition of food’s crucial place in our lives. Arrowby declares: “Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too. How fortunate we are to be food-consuming animals [are there any others?]. Every meal should be a treat and one ought to bless every day which brings with it a good digestion and the precious gift of hunger.”

Convenience foods (as with the aforementioned ketchup) are not to be sneered at. Arrowby, owning to a “liberal use of the tin-opener”, describes one lunch of “tinned macaroni cheese jazzed up with oil, garlic, basil and more cheese and a lovely dish of cold boiled courgettes. (courgettes should never be fried)”. With the kippers come “fried tinned new potatoes” — a culinary offering I have happily never encountered.

Corned beef is enjoyed with plain boiled onions and, later, with red cabbage and pickled walnuts, bottled pastes (bloater and anchovy) are teamed with hot buttered toast (“What is more delicious?”). Dried apricots are eaten with cheese (Eaten with cake they should be “soaked and simmered first, eaten with cheese they should be aboriginally dry”).

While I would not dream of contradicting Dame Iris on any of these points, I must observe that she is not the only one capable of laying down the law in these matters. Page 177 of The Sea The Sea finds a character “fiddling in a cupboard” to find dry sherry. The drink, in fact, should not be kept in a cupboard but in a refrigerator. Nor should it really be ‘kept’ at all but, in common with all white wines, opened and disposed of quickly.