A fantastic essayist, the inimitable Muriel Spark addresses here the writing life; love; cats; favorite writers (T. S. Eliot, Robert Burns, the Brontes, Mary Shelley); Piero della Francesca; life in wartime London and in glamorous Hollywood-on-the-Tiber; 1960s Rome; faith; and parties (on her first New Year’s Eve, as a baby sipping her mother’s sherry: I always loved a party ). Spark’s scope is amazing, and her striking, glancing insights are precise and unforgettable. From the mysteries of Job’s sufferings, she glides to Dame Edith Sitwell’s cocktail advice about how to handle a nasty publisher, and on to the joys of success.