CV

At the Scotsman, Ian Rankin considers Martin Stannard's biography of Muriel Spark. Best detail: Spark "accepted a cat from Patricia Highsmith"! Other "nice vignettes" singled out by Rankin (who famously set out to write a thesis on Spark's fiction before turning to a Life of Crime):

At a signing at Fortnum's, she is mistaken for an assistant and happily wraps the customer's purchase. During a research trip to Mount Carmel her driver crashes into a market-stall and she returns to her hotel in a police van. If someone touched a pen she was using, she threw it away rather than write with it again.