“... 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 ...”

“... female correspondents he considered literary or intellectual worthies and equals (Oates, Ozick, Muriel Spark, Diana Athill, Erica Jong), he was on best behaviour, courtly and solicitous, but fiction with too much feminine essence could bring out his alluvial worst. In an otherwise businesslike missive to his British publisher André Deutsch, he calls ...”

“... novels – not just by the nouveau roman, but by native work that would remain engrossing to him (Muriel Spark, Henry Green, Beckett, B.S. Johnson, Burgess). One is struck by Kermode’s determination, early on, to find a path between the formalist scepticism of Barthes and Robbe-Grillet, and the ‘naive’ humanism of the English tradition. Crudely ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Nabokov books: Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince or Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater, though Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat, which has all the right ingredients, was surely conceived mystically between the author and God, without Nabokov’s mediation. Still, Spark put her finger on the reason Nabokov’s ...”

“... with me ... (Query: Who was Sappho and what was Isle of Lesbos?)’ Watt does include part of Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means set in the May of Teck, a women’s club, during the Blitz. For special occasions the girls share a taffeta evening dress by Schiaparelli, its warm colours and panniered hips setting off each wearer slightly ...”

“... have been a patron saint for a Catholic postmodernism. Waugh recognised as much when he welcomed Muriel Spark’s first novel, The Comforters (1957), as an essentially Catholic book. Spark, a self-described ‘Gentile Jewess’ who had converted to Canterbury then Rome in quick succession, pursued in this and ...”

“... continue to propel events, as they do for Dame Lettie Colston, in another of her sources, Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori. Having ‘dangerously forgotten’ about the love affair which prompted her lingering dislike of the more intelligent Miss Taylor, she is at a disadvantage in their exchanges. Present selves overlie older, or rather ...”

“... as a court reporter (‘a tourist in a way’), searching for the story that would give him his spark. He had already published many pieces as a film critic, but 97,196 Words begins here, in January 1990, with his court dispatches. In the first four pieces, Carrère covers the case of a son who tried to kill his mother; the case of a mother who killed her ...”

“... to seem arcane if one were more interested in the science, the narratology, than in the story. Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a short novel nearly everybody knows. Asked to tell its story you would have to give up any idea of following the order of events presented by the text. The play and the film give one an idea of the ...”