Muriel Spark
Inside the Booker Prize: arguments, agonies and carefully encouraged scandals
The long read: Its knack for creating tension and controversy has helped it remain an energising force in publishing for more than 50 years – but how do writers, publishers and judges cope with the annual agony of the Booker?
Charlotte Higgins
05, Oct, 2021 @5:00 AM
The reputation game: how authors try to control their image from beyond the grave
The row over a new biography of Philip Roth has exposed the way agents and estates restrict access and manage archives to maintain a writer’s posthumous good name
Edward Helmore
23, May, 2021 @2:36 PM
Top 10 mentors in fiction
From Homer to Hilary Mantel, these inspiring, sometimes ambiguous figures are a perennial flint-spark for storytelling
Benjamin Myers
04, Mar, 2020 @12:32 PM
How to survive after Fleabag: a cultural guide
All the shows, books and even bands to seek out if you need more of a Fleabag-y fix
09, Apr, 2019 @11:50 AM
Book clinic: what’s likely to impress an English literature admissions tutor?
Philip Hensher suggests some great novelists, from GK Chesterton to VS Naipaul, who aren’t on the curriculum
Philip Hensher
02, Feb, 2019 @5:59 PM
Margaret Drabble: ‘Lee Child does all the things I could never do. I’m awestruck’
The novelist, biographer and critic on laughing at Muriel Spark and never reading any Harry Potter
Margaret Drabble
18, Jan, 2019 @10:00 AM
Deborah Levy: ‘I am haunted by Alice’s white rabbit. I think I’ve met him in a London pub'
The playwright, novelist and poet on the cleverness of Muriel Spark, how Marguerite Duras influenced her and why Zora Neale Hurston is underrated
Deborah Levy
14, Dec, 2018 @9:59 AM
Ian Rankin: ‘I couldn’t get on with War and Peace’
The crime author on why he loves comics, his early interest in taboo worlds and, with a 22nd Rebus novel out, how he keeps his famous detective fresh
Hannah Beckerman
03, Nov, 2018 @6:00 PM
Challenged – in a good way – by Muriel Spark’s only stage play | Letters
Letters: Actor Fenella Fielding starred in the first production of the Scottish novelist’s Doctors of Philosophy, while Margaret Metcalf remembers its later staging in St Albans
Letters
10, Aug, 2018 @3:05 PM
'A thoroughly entertaining failure': the return of Muriel Spark's mega-flop
Her savage send-up of the London intelligentsia was panned by critics. But could Doctors of Philosophy now be about to hit its prime?
Charlotte Higgins
08, Aug, 2018 @12:20 PM
From Dante to I Love Dick: top 10 books about unrequited love
Novelist Kirsty Gunn chooses books that explore a very literary kind of longing
Kirsty Gunn
27, Jun, 2018 @9:53 AM
The week in TV: The Bridge; The Many Primes of Muriel Spark; Conviction: Murder in Suburbia; Snatches
With the brilliant Scandi noir The Bridge about to leave us, a true-crime inquiry showed how elusive satisfying endings are
Euan Ferguson
24, Jun, 2018 @6:00 AM
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