Coleridge in 1809: 'In the present age (emphatically the age of personality!) there are more than ordinary motives for withholding all encouragement from this mania, of busying ourselves with the names of others, which is still more alarming as a symptom, than it is troublesome as a disease.'

It is a great joke. I think Peter Conradi read the two authors as being divisions of the things Murdoch feared she was or was seen as. There's certainly some very self-aware exaggerations of her quirks.

I'd really recommend that you read The Black Prince in your Murdoch spree, but (if you haven't read it already) ideally only when you've read quite a few of her others, so you can appreciate what she's doing to herself!

Congratulations, Adrian! Hope the well-deserved pint was a good one.

Towards the longer side of novella, but Piranesi and This is How You Lose the Time War? Sofia Samatar's The Practice, the Horizon and the Chain (although that's resistance to serious oppression)? Adrian Tchaikovsky's Elder Race? (Several of his would work.)

I feel like it's a series designed to start a whole series of conversations genre studies really needs, and was in many respects blocked from starting those conversations in the eighties.

To be fair, if you were going to do a semester-long course on one Fantasy series, that's one from which students would take a lot away. I have a PhD student working on Nevèrÿon at the moment who keeps finding new interesting angles.