What is so fascinating about Muriel Spark? In the last decade before she died aged 88 in 2006, any interview with the Scottish author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie became an event. The excitement was firstly because she was an artist of the old school, famous not only for her brilliant and complex novels, but also for her unconventional life in Italy, where she lived up a hill with her friend Penelope Jardine, who was also her assistant (and now, in her nineties, her literary executor).

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