A Scottish journalist offers rare insight into the life and mind of the renowned expat author in this “beguiling, fascinating memoir” (The Guardian, UK).   In 1990, Alan Taylor traveled to Arezzo, Italy, to interview one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century. That interview evolved into a close friendship between Taylor and Muriel Spark that lasted until her death in 2006. In this intimate, anecdotal, admiring and indiscreet memoir, Taylor charts the course of Spark’s life, revealing her as she really was.   Once, Spark commented sitting over a glass of chianti at the kitchen table, that she was upset that the academic whom she had appointed her official biographer did not appear to think that she had ever cracked a joke in her life. Here, Taylor sets the record straight about this and many other things. With sources ranging from notebooks kept from his first encounter with Muriel and the hundreds of letters they exchanged over the years, this is an invaluable portrait of one of Edinburgh’s premiere novelists.