Muriel Spark always regarded the Brontes with a novelist's eye. As Boyd Tonkin argues in his lively introduction, written for the new edition, the Brontes inspired Spark at the very beginning of her own career, but not in a straightforward way. Throu...

The essays, reviews, memoirs and other writings collected here for the first time conjure up one of the great critical imaginations of our time. Grouped into four sections (Art and Poetry; Autobiography and Travel; Literature; and Religion, Politics...