Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator,

and my guest this week is the critic writer and biographer Francis Wilson,

described on the back of her new book as the maister of literary biography of our days. And I can't

disagree. Her new book is called Electric Spark, the Enigma of Muriel Spark. Now, Francis,

this is a most unusual and original approach to its subject. It's not quite straight biography.

It's something different than that and something a bit more than that.

But it comes as it starts in the kind of, it stands in the shadow of a straight biography by Martin

Stanod, which was just such a catastrophe, wasn't it? And it sort of takes off from the failure of

that one, Francisco, poor Martin

Stanard. Yes. What made you kind of think there's room here for a book? Well, it's a biography

of a biography, if you like. Well, it's framed around the relationship between Muriel Spark

and Martin Stanard. And I was interested in that right from the start.

I started to hear about, as we all did in what Muriel calls the world of books. We started to

hear about the fallout between the biographer and her subjects quite early on. And I've always

been interested in biographers falling out with their subjects and

Jack's falling out with biographers. And so I was intrigued by what was going on between them and

very interested to read the book when it came out. And I wanted to get inside the whole business

of why it was that a woman as guarded and as private as Muriel Spark

invited someone in to write her life and then treat them as a blackmailer, which is effectively

what happened. And she, I mean, that biography took years to produce. She did everything if you possibly could to hobble it.

I mean, I can't remember that she took legal action against him, but she, you know, totally re-wrote his manuscript, all the rest of it.

...