Muriel Spark

"I am a descendant, do not forget, of Willie Brodie, a man of substance, a cabinet maker and designer of gibbets, a member of the Town Council of Edinburgh and a keeper of two mistresses who bore him five children between them. Blood tells. He died cheerfully on a gibbet of his own devising in seventeen-eighty-eight. This is the stuff I am made of."

-from "The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie."

Muriel Spark died on Good Friday in Italy at the age of eighty-eight.