Alexander McCall Smith

And indeed, there's a whole new edition of her novels being published in Scotland.

And I've recently been writing the introduction to one of those because they're getting a contemporary writer to read

to do an introduction to each of these books.

And I did the introduction to her novel, Symposium, which is a wonderful piece of work.

It's one of the later novels in her body of work.

It's full of coruscatingly funny dialogue.

I mean, it's really wonderful and marvelous observations and terrible surprises.

Because Muriel Spark is a great one for springing surprises on us.

And also it's got one of the great comic scenes of 20th century fiction, in my view, which is a scene with some nuns, involving some nuns, and it's got the most splendidly foul-mouthed nun.

LAUGHTER

And the nuns all smoke and swear like troopers.

It's very, very funny.

She was pretty wicked writer.

She really had this wonderful sharp eye, you know, tremendously sharp eye.

And of course, she wrote that classic Edinburgh novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

which is, I think, the definitive Edinburgh novel all about this marvellous, really eccentric and quite dangerous schoolteacher, Jean Brodie in the 1930s, who actually was a bit of a fascist.

She admired Mussolini.

and spoke to her little girls and said, in Italy, little gals, Mussolini has abolished litter.

Which, you know, that sort of thing.

So really quite sinister.