It may not be true, but I have the feeling that Muriel Spark is one of the few, in the category of fine writers, who has a grand time at her work. This is not because she writes comedy. It would be wrong to believe that people who write comedy sit down to their desks already laughing. However, readers who have enjoyed her novels from the early Robinson and Memento Mori may suspect that Muriel Spark sits down to her desk already malevolent. In her new book, Territorial Rights, there is hardly a character one doesn't enjoy a little, but the whole lot of them are rotters, really, really rotters. And in the end there is the suggestion of a distribution of their fates which is neither just, nor actually unjust, but is funny….

None of the characters has even a rudimentary sense of conviction, of moral integrity...