Have you found that for you?

It's definitely very warm here.

We're lucky with the ground we've got, which holds the moisture, so the grass is still growing.

Animals, not liking it at all.

You know, nice animal for a dairy cow, eight degrees.

We're definitely, you know, we're nearly 30 degrees above that one day a few weeks ago and The cows were telling us about it, you know, you could just see they were suffering.

We'd definitely be trying to sort of manage our way through it.

James, I'm interested in what's next for you and your journey, farming and

Have you found that for you?

It's definitely very warm here.

We're lucky with the ground we've got, which holds the moisture.

So the grass is still growing.

Animals not liking it at all.

You know, nice animal for a dairy cow, eight degrees.

We're definitely, you know, we're nearly 30 degrees above that one day a few weeks ago and The cows were telling us about it, you know, you could just see they were suffering.

James, I'm interested in what's next for you and your journey, farming and

Mm-hmm

... uh, over 10 years older than her, a, a maths teacher who, uh, has got a job in South Africa, and, and she follows him there, marries him, has a child, and she thinks her writing life will now kickstart because she is seeing the world, and it goes terribly wrong.

The details of that are, are kind of explored in the book.

She eventually manages to escape that situation after several unhappy years.

She moves to, to London, bombed-out London, the, the very end of the Second World War.

And this starts a- yet another reinvention.

She works for the, the, the wartime effort really in, in political, uh, intelligence and, and what was called black propaganda, which was about creating fake news essentially to demoralize the enemy.

Mm

and

Ryan Wigglesworth have been appointed to three-year tenure just to look at the kind of training that young artists get at the Britain Peers School and taking on the amazing legacy that Britain and Peers have created there.

And this Our job is just to think about what that legacy looks like in today's music world, to try and keep everything of the spirit of the training that I was lucky enough to get at this amazing place.

But just to make sure that we're responding to today's music world, which is looking a lot different than it did in Britain's day.

I fled to into Alba as a kid and that was very special for me because I'd never seen an English seaside town.

It was just a very different experience to what my childhood in South Africa was like.

opera has always been a place that's special to me because of the family connection.

The hall is... you know, participating is helping you achieve what you're trying to achieve.

Were there things like that that you're worried, oh, this might actually make me want to distance myself from Muriel Spark rather than engage with her work?

Well, Spark's relationship with her son, which, as you say, is an estranged and at times very painful relationship, has already kind of been raked over in other biographies and also in the press.

I mean, the Daily Mail loves to every now and then re-emerge with another story about Spark and her son.

So what I was more interested in in this book was how Spark how Spark felt about the changes to her public persona as a result of that, and how she would very delicately broach the subject.

And she really got away with doing that for quite a long time until the mid-90s, where certain aspects of their relationship went public.

And then she really was kind of...

under fire, really, from certain sections of the tabloid press.

And so she's not necessarily new to you, but in the project of writing this, was there anything that most surprised you that you simply weren't expecting? Whether it delighted you or not, I guess, is a follow-up question.