In Muriel Spark's novel Loitering with Intent, it's 1949 and Fleur Talbot is too busy typing for the Autobiographical Association that employs her as its secretary to get much of her novel actually written on the job. Indeed, the memoirs are so dull that Fleur takes it upon herself to liven them up. A suggestive scene involving a nanny, a butler and a rocking horse adds spice to the writing of a timid merchant, for example. It's all grist for the mill as "the ideas of the day ...

—Lynn Peril