Blocked

Minna Proctor on an encounter with Muriel Spark.

Also: Dickens' best novel?

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.

Transfigurations

I have to get Martin Stannard's Muriel Spark biography:

Her own bodily transfiguration was less spiritual than Christ’s, but as striking in its way. It was brought about, Stannard tells us, with the aid of manicures, waxes, perms, designer dresses, perfume and jewellery, and the result was a “mythological” being, the personification of glamour. One acquaintance recalls a vision of white fox furs and diamonds shimmering up to him at a party, and realising only later that it was Spark. She had an entourage of young men with whom she liked to be seen. They were never sexual partners, Stannard testifies, but “delightful accessories”, like her Cartier diamond wristwatch, or the Manhattan apartment that she bought but never used, or her racehorse, Lifeboat.

"Born in ice cave of centaur stock"

Martin Stannard on Muriel Spark.