Alexander McCall Smith

which is quite an interesting device.

I suppose it's one way of rounding things off nicely, and perhaps if people are reading that chapter in bed, it's an appropriate way of ending the chapter.

But other writers did it.

Tolstoy, Trollope did it.

I've recently been reading my way through Trollope, and Framley Parsonage was one of them that was written on a serial basis, and it shows in the structure of the book.

You can see this as a serial.

Well, Trollope, I think, is wonderfully entertaining.

If you like Austen, as I think 99.99% of the population does, or would if they read her, if you like Austen, then you're always on the lookout for Austen substitutes.

In other words, who else will you enjoy?

And, of course, you've got Barbara Pym here,

in the 20th century, who I think was the 20th century reincarnation of Jane Austen, and Barbara Pym wrote these wonderful small-scale novels concerned with exactly the sort of thing that Jane Austen was concerned with, which was a tiny little picture of life of people leading really rather mousy lives in the interstices of bigger events.

So you've got Barbara Pym, but you've also got Trollope.

I think you'll get the same pleasure from Trollope, as you will, from Austen.

Now, that's heresy in the Austenite world.

You know, the supporters of Jane Austen would say, how dare you compare her with any other writer?

But Trollope provides the same sort of entertainment.

And there's also the same issues come up in Trollope about is somebody going to marry somebody else, which is really what Jane Austen's all about.

Yes, Muriel Spark was a wonderful writer.

And of course, this year is Muriel Spark's centenary.

So there have been quite a number of events in Edinburgh and elsewhere.