Penelope Jardine on Woman's Hour

Here is a link to a podcast of yesterday's (27th March) BBC Radio 4 Woman's Hour (available for download for a further 29 days) where Penelope Jardine discusses The Golden Fleece essays.

Ian Rankin portrait...

...gifted to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery;  the link to the BBC news story is here in which Rankin  remembers that when he was a student at Edinburgh University, doing his thesis on Muriel Spark, her portrait came to the gallery.

New Publications

At the end of this month (28 March) Carcanet Press will be publishing The Golden Fleece: Essays by Muriel Spark, edited by Penelope Jardine.     Please use the above web link to take you to the page which has all the details.

And at the end of April , the University of Notre Dame Press are publishing Hidden Possibilities:  Essays in Honor of Muriel Spark by Robert Ellis Hosmer.   The contributors include Regina Barreca, Gerard Carruthers, Barbara Epler, John Glavin, Dan Gunn, Robert E. Hosmer Jr., Joseph Hynes, Gabriel Josipovici, Frank Kermode, John Lanchester, David Malcolm, John Mortimer, Alan Taylor, and John Updike and Muriel Spark's friend Doris Lessing.

Doris Lessing's obituary in The Guardian published in November last year is here and there will be a  memorial service for her on 7 April at St-Martin-in-the-Fields in London.

The Alphabet Library: B is for The Bachelors

In The Telegraph - an intriguing idea and a very good, incisive article about Muriel Spark's 1960 novel The Bachelors.