Muriel Spark, one of the most brilliant and enigmatic of post-war writers, gives a rare interview at her home in Tuscany as the literature series returns. The author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Memento Mori talks to Alan Taylor about her Edinburgh childhood, her doomed marriage, the poverty she endured as a struggling writer, and the eventual publication of her first novel, The Comforters, when she was 39. Her unique style of fiction - full of wit but laced with supernatural events and dark, violent deaths - is demonstrated in extracts from her work in a television biography featuring contributions from fellow novelists David Lodge and Doris Lessing.