A fantastic essayist, the inimitable Muriel Spark addresses here the writing life; love; cats; favorite writers (T. S. Eliot, Robert Burns, the Brontës, 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.