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“... that Rayner Heppenstall as a Features producer could call Angus Wilson, Henry Reed, Laurie Lee and Muriel Spark ‘exclusively mine’, and there were staff stars like Louis MacNeice and W.R. Rodgers (stars at the bar of the George as well as in Broadcasting House). It was in some ways a clique, but a distinguished one. Who listened? At the ...”

“... our mothers, An Experiment in Love is in part a confrontation with Mantel’s own literary mother, Muriel Spark. The particular point of reference is The Girls of Slender Means, published in 1963. Parallels between the two books are specific enough, in terms of plot, style and narrative structure, to make the later work something approaching an act of ...”

“... with incorporating ‘unexamined social assumptions’ into their novels. The Driver’s Seat, by Muriel Spark, is similarly misread and its grimly playful quality not taken into account. It isn’t, despite Rosalind Miles’s assertion to the contrary, a depressing illustration of the female’s ‘masochistic search for the man who will ...”

“... to his magazine. His afterlife came later as afterlives do, and is missing from the book. So are Muriel Spark, V.S. Naipaul, and the explosive William Golding. Philip Larkin is present. Not really for his poems as for the tirelessly sardonic and sarcastic bulletins on national life sent in letters to his friend Monica Jones. Larkin’s offendedness was ...”

“... A similar preoccupation is present in some of the best writings by Jennings’s near contemporary Muriel Spark, but Spark is a novelist enjoying high sales, and living in sunny climes. Jennings was different. She lived in rainy Oxford where it is lonely to be an intellectual without a university attachment. Her work ...”

“... whose mode is elliptical, and whose secrets are guilty. They are called Ivy Compton-Burnett, Muriel Spark and Beryl Bainbridge. All have crime at the heart of their novels. None of them is a crime novelist. Patricia Highsmith is. And in making murder her main point, she has avoided being thought of primarily as a woman novelist. She has made a ...”

“... Several of the modern selections are disappointing. Watson includes George Bruce but he excludes Muriel Spark; there’s nothing from Douglas Dunn’s Elegies (Dunn is allowed only two poems, and is confused with Ted Hughes in the Introduction). At times the theory which seems to underlie this book is stronger than its actual contents. This is an ...”

“... was married to the biographer and Flaubert scholar Francis Steegmuller (they were introduced by Muriel Spark, which doesn’t seem like the most propitious start) and lived with him in New York, Naples and Capri. She suffered from dementia and died in 2016.Hazzard published four novels – The Transit of Venus (1980) and The Great Fire (2003) are ...”

“... cities turn – and much more about the gaslighters noticed by Stevenson, the Bruntsfield Place of Muriel Spark, the graves of the Canongate where the geniuses lie. You could take a walk in each city with the book in your hand and see where ideas have shaped the stone. It’s a tale of two cities as represented by their storytellers, their makars, their ...”

“... that will be put down and picked up over several sittings. I wonder if she’s considered writing Muriel Spark-length novels; not so long that she’d need multiple plots, but not so short that she could only have one character. Perhaps Travel and Leisure could arrange for her to go to ...”

“... rogues have a history of work in care homes or hospitals. Her writing has been compared to that of Muriel Spark, Anita Brookner and Dahl, on the grounds that her approach to cruelty is placid, even-toned. It can be hard to judge whether her sagging, decrepit subjects are the objects of her derision or her pity; in the books, misanthropy and humanism are ...”

“... was the literary editor of the Spectator. He had lots of wives and was very like a publisher in a Muriel Spark novel. I rather wonder if her latest isn’t about Derek Verschoyle. He was really rather a crook, though very smooth, and it now turns out that he had done some dirty tricks for MI6. He would arrive with terrible black eyes, given him by his ...”

“... of the Cross, male orgasm of the death of Christ (emisit spiritum) etc. Less amazing artists – Muriel Spark, for example – might accept the more temperate Christian realism of Auerbach: each event signifies ‘something other’ but ‘without prejudice to the power of its concrete reality here and now’. William Golding is obviously in some sense ...”

“... are fewer and the ethical positions less idiosyncratic, this book has a slight flavour of Muriel Spark. The family of the title is rich London-Jewish, established, we are told, from the debris of its European predecessor: living in pre-war London and enjoying what it offered, but without altogether sacrificing traditional Middle-European manners ...”

“... Negatively, you won’t expect, and won’t find, anything that looks very ‘experimental’. Muriel Spark must have come up again and again, sometimes against what, looking at the list, one imagines cannot have been enormously powerful competition; and if she can’t make it, there seems little hope for such as Christine Brooke-Rose or Alan ...”