“... 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 ...”

“... moving towards a surreal world of his own contrivance. The literary Britain of Larkin, or early Muriel Spark, or Angus Wilson, has still found no Grosz or Hopper. The landscapes of the new England will go on, it seems, attracting more words than ...”

“... of characterisation seems itself antiquarian, as if Woolf and Proust and Chekhov, not to mention Muriel Spark and Penelope Fitzgerald, had never existed. Byatt’s formidable research commands respect, but it is hard fully to respect a novel in which Rodin, Oscar Wilde, Emma Goldman and Marie Stopes have walk-on parts, or that delivers itself of lines ...”

“... intellectual pantheon, formalising Nairn’s place alongside figures like Hugh MacDiarmid, Muriel Spark and Ascherson himself. Ascherson is keen that this process of national canonisation should not become one of pacification and moderation. Disputing Eric Hobsbawm’s suggestion, quoting Lenin, that Nairn simply ‘painted nationalism ...”

“... numerous suggestive examples and connections, from Shakespeare and Sterne to Kafka, Borges and Muriel Spark. The powers of artifice, of code and convention, exert a claim which should at least give us pause in the drive toward ‘deep’ interpretations of motive and meaning. ‘Sterne goes shallower than that,’ as Josipovici artfully puts it. His ...”

“... hustlers and impostors which composes a literary London reminiscent of the early novels of Muriel Spark, and far from brutally inauthentic. The queen is Harriet Scrope, novelist, plot-stealer and ferocious egotist, whose war against the world she inhabits extends to her best friend and her cat. As a comic portrait of the artist, Harriet scores ...”

“... of the work of writers as different (different from each other as well as different from him) as Muriel Spark or Truman Capote in part because in each case their work demonstrates that, where formal inventiveness is concerned, playfulness doesn’t merely issue in comedy. Still, it may be his fate to be celebrated as a contributor to the sub-genre now ...”

“... under the general editorship of Nora Crook.) Seymour’s reservations here were anticipated by Muriel Spark in her own crisply excellent Mary Shelley (revised edition, 1988), a book neatly divided between biography and literary criticism, which praises the Lives while finding only Frankenstein, The Last Man and isolated passages in Perkin Warbeck ...”

“... Rose Street was a shithole of gender politics, emblematic in some ways of the Edinburgh that Muriel Spark fled. The golden boys of Scottish literature loved it. In Milne’s bar the shy Brown drank, and grew witty and charismatic, though he still remained something of an outsider, homesick at times for Orkney. In the Abbotsford pub in 1957 he met ...”

“... on his humanity without producing any change in behaviour. It encourages people to believe, Muriel Spark commented more recently, ‘that their moral responsibilities are sufficiently fulfilled by the emotions they have been induced to feel’. In short, it is a substitute for charity.Of the two positions, optimistic and pessimistic, I suspect both ...”

“... book of short stories, published in 1963, is dedicated to Vivante. Through Maxwell she got to know Muriel Spark, whose New Yorker period was at its height in 1962; they called each other ‘Shirlers’ and ‘Mu’.She met Steegmuller in New York in 1963. They were introduced by Spark, who described the engineered ...”

“... English versions of European metaphysical fables’ – English, maybe, in the sense that Muriel Spark was Scottish and Isak Dinesen Danish, and that Marguerite Duras was French. Byatt does not make this point, but it’s worth noticing, surely, that this minor modern tradition often attracts women writers, maybe because its minority and ...”

“... knew Glasgow or the big English cities. I didn’t know, and wouldn’t have cared if I had, that Muriel Spark was half-Jewish or that Ivor Cutler came from a Glasgow Jewish family. What I knew of Jews was gleaned – not that I was trying to glean – from news about Israel, from books and films about the Holocaust, from a TV play by Jack Rosenthal set ...”