On 1 May 1954, Muriel Spark, then a 36-year-old divorcee recovering from a mental breakdown, was received into the Roman Catholic Church at the then Ealing Priory. “I shut my eyes,” as she put it, “and plunged into another dimension of life. I became a Catholic, but that was not all.”

What had Spark converted from, or to, and what did she mean by “that was not all”? Born Muriel Camberg in Edinburgh in 1918, she was educated by Presbyterians in the school on which she modelled the Marcia Blaine school in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Her father, who worked at the local rubber factory, was a non-orthodox Jew and her mother, who was half-Jewish, put seven candles in the window on the Sabbath, went to synagogue on Yom Kippur, kept an image of Christ in her locket, a Buddha on a lotus leaf in the living room, served hot cross buns at Easter, mince pies at Christmas and pork all year round. When young Muriel asked her father what he believed in, he lowered the Racing Post, took a drag of his John Player’s, and replied, “the Almighty”.

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