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“... yourself stupid at the Soho academies in Dean Street and Old Compton Street. To be accepted by Muriel at the Colony Club and Gaston at the French Pub added kudos to the twilit and self-conscious life of a Soho drunk. Self-image was no less important then than it is now. In Rome she found the men who hung about her unacceptable, except for one who stroked ...”

“... as merely a virtuous wife, tender of her husband’s flame following his early death. In 1951, Muriel Spark rescued Mary’s literary reputation in her critical biography. Until then, Mary’s assertion that Shelley’s ‘genius, far transcending mine, awakened & guided my thoughts’ prevailed; many believed him the true author of Frankenstein, and ...”

“... with him, Nabokov and Davies wandered around Montreux. These men are rewarded with praising prose. Muriel Spark was stingy with her time – could she have had something better to do, I wonder, than kill a morning with Davies? – so she gets her comeuppance in The Grand Tour. As for the trip otherwise: our journalist starts out from Victoria, takes the ...”

“... what we do.’ Her account of London in the period is as sharp as anything by Barbara Comyns or Muriel Spark. Her phonetic transcriptions of accents, while dated, bring into earshot a teeming cast of characters – East Enders, posh North Londoners, Italian immigrants and so on.As a child Gilroy was considered ‘sickly’, and at the age of two was ...”

“... reminds me a little of The Girls of Slender Means, though it lacks the theological ruthlessness of Muriel Spark. One sees these people not as caricatures but as somehow unsoiled by the next forty years, capable of simplicity and unconsidered goodness. This applies even to the principal male characters: the selfish Director of Recorded Programmes ...”

“... some of the novelists who have come to prominence since the Fifties: B.S. Johnson, Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark, Anthony Burgess, V.S. Naipaul. The list is not intended to identify a new pantheon, nor meant to be exclusive. Most of the essays were occasional pieces written over the last decade. But they do, individually and collectively, allow Parrinder ...”

“... novels. Precedents exist in the work of Catholic or Anglo-Catholic writers like Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spark and A.N. Wilson. The greater the distance from which human life is seen, the more like a certain kind of black comedy it tends to look. Updike has praised the ‘sublime hard-heartedness’ of Waugh’s fiction, and contrasted it favourably with ...”

“... the novel’s chapters. Like Dougal Douglas, the sinister fabulist of The Ballad of Peckham Rye (Muriel Spark, a one-time Camberwell resident, is mentioned by Anna and Yves), the two old storytellers’ tales have an energising effect independent of their truth or benignity.There are two shocks mentioned in A Shock, the shock of death and the shock of ...”

“... publishing fiction in the 1950s – Butor and Murdoch but also Anthony Burgess, William Golding, Muriel Spark and Pynchon – and who were not just trying to make sense of our lives but, as Kermode put it, ‘making sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives’.For Murray, ‘a real Pynchon thing’ is the mode of thinking where you put ‘a ...”

“... also, since it’s in the neo-romantic style of postwar poetry (David Gascoyne? Dylan Thomas? the Muriel Spark of those days, even?), to measure the distance between now and then: ‘London is transformed. The red underground becomes blood thundering under London’s skin ... The stuttering sky full of birds plucks the eyes like parchment. A sigh ...”

“... as a woman writer and ending up as a lady novelist. The latter title might also be reserved for Muriel Spark, who, as Liam McIlvanney points out in an essay here on Scottish writing, displays ‘a contempt for the wretched, a relished indifference to suffering’. Far from overlooking the poor, she ‘turns from their plight with a meaningful ...”

“... Catholic background and taste for bittersweet mysticism, other names suggest themselves here too: Muriel Spark, Penelope Fitzgerald, Angela Carter, Fay Weldon.) She slowly assumed the status of national treasure, despite or maybe precisely because of the cannily maintained, resonantly low profile. There are forms of politesse and prevarication that can ...”

“... though she pretends not to be – around the hedgehogs, such as Hilary Mantel, in this book, and Muriel Spark (1990). She leaves them, maybe, feeling – as she wrote in 2004 of Julie Burchill – that ‘she has frittered her talent away.’ ‘But at the end of the day,’ Burchill said when Barber put this to her, ‘when my little spellcheck’s ...”

“... visible and reliable. Few younger contemporary writers risk the kind of biblical interference that Muriel Spark hazards, or that V.S. Naipaul practises in A House for Mr Biswas, in which the narrative eschatologically leaps ahead to inform us of how the characters will end their lives, or casually blinks away years at a time: ‘In all, Mr Biswas lived ...”

“... ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions.’ The London that Muriel Spark describes in The Girls of Slender Means – ‘buildings in bad repair or in no repair at all, bombsites piled with stony rubble, houses like giant teeth in which decay had been drilled out, leaving only the cavity’ – was still in existence ...”