kim.rooney@abctales.com

I'm unnerved at dinner parties; too much talking, too little dialogue, I can never quite grasp what's really being said. Muriel Spark's Symposium has a dinner party as its centrepiece: "They are a party of ten. The house is in Islington. The room is very beige, with a glimpse of the dining-room which is predominantly kingfisher blue." You know from this, there will be muted undertones to match all that beige.

The hosts are a mid-life pair: Chris Donovan, a rich Australian widow and Hurley Reed, an American painter. Theirs is a "union of great convenience and contentment", which is just as well because several of their guests are discomfited by inconvenience and discontent.

The table talk revolves mostly around the aftershocks of two crimes: a burglary and bag-snatching. Lord Suzy repeatedly declares the burglary, in which the miscreants "pee'd all over the place" but left the Francis Bacon painting hanging on the wall, is "like rape". His much younger wife, Helen, to whom he has been married not quite a year, has already tired of his wild declarations of calamity. Meanwhile William Damien, just back from his honeymoon recounts how his new wife had her bag snatched in Florence. "Margaret lost her passport and her Mastercard; we had to go to the Consulate..." Margaret however is waxing philosophic: "According to some mystics the supreme good is to divest yourself of all your best-loved possessions."

And the evening winds like this, right up to the crème brûlée. Apart from some meanderings on marriage ("the vows of love-passion are like confessions obtained under torture") just to lighten the tone. But what none of the guests say out loud is: 'There's something about Margaret'. It's a thought her sister Eunice has incubated for years and now Margaret née Murchie has fallen under suspicion at this north London soir*eacutee. Nobody believes she met William Damien by chance in the fruit aisle at Marks and Spencer. Or in her soothsaying chat up line: "Be careful, those grapefruits look a little bruised". It's a plot her wealthy mother-in-law, Hilda Damien, has never believed and she has confided as much to her friend, the hostess.

Symposium cleverly undercuts the progression of the dinner party with the unearthing of Margaret Murchie's past. It's a past peppered with "unfortunate occurrences" of a deathly kind for those straying too close into Margaret's orbit. And always lurking in the shadows of such misfortune has been "Mad Magnus" Murchie, Margaret's uncle and inmate of the Jeffrey King mental clinic in Perthshire. The two, Margaret's father notes, have "an affinity".

It's part of Muriel Spark's supreme craft, that her dialogue lets us hear how the sane are often mad and the mad quite plausible. "Generally speaking," says Magnus to Margaret in an affinity moment, "guilty people do not feel guilty. They feel exalted, triumphant, amused at themselves." As Ian Rankin writes in his new introduction to the novel: "Her genius stems from the fact that she was an expert stylist who could engage the general reader while still posing tough questions."

The novel takes its name and pulse from Plato's The Symposium; a discursive travel around the theme of love, aided in ancient Greek fashion by much drinking. It's attended by the philosophical Socrates, who is clearly the model for Mad Magnus, and could easily have lent him his lines. "Is not the good also the beautiful?" posits Socrates. "Then in wanting the beautiful, love wants also the good." Except of course, Magnus's idea of the good is a little different.

It took a while for the novel to work its magic. Like a bad-tempered dinner guest I was restless with the hors d'oeuvre scene setting and impatient for the main course to arrive. And then it did, and all was served beautifully.

"The sixties," writes Joe Boyd, "began in the summer of 1956, ended in October of 1973 and peaked before dawn on 1 July, 1967 during a set by Tomorrow at the UFO Club in London." This opener disqualifies Boyd from Paul Kanter's famous dictum:"If you can remember anything about the Sixties, you weren't really there." Joe Boyd was there and White Bicycles offers a retrospective groove for those still suffering memory loss or worse with birth tags that meant the '60s happened without them.

Boyd had a clear trajectory towards the '67 Summer of Love. A white Bostonian middle-class kid, he had a revelation while watching black R&B and Jazz artistes erupting from mid-fifties TV programmes. By 1960, Boyd was watching the blues and jazz singer/guitarist Lonnie Johnson live in a neighbours' living room. It was the first entrepreneurial deal for the would be music producer.

From there, a right place, right time vibe found Boyd working with the Incredible String Band, Fairport Convention, Nick Drake, and Richard Thompson. He formed production company, Witchseason, and with John Hopkins co-founded the UFO, a club psychedelia, hosting Pink Floyd and the Soft Machine. He also lost a few gigs. Despite producing the Floyd's first momentous single, Arnold Layne, a contract with EMI severed the Boyd bond. And Scientology sneaked the String Band away.

There's no hint of resentment. Boyd is dispassionate, even about bedtime tales although there are few. There's one long night on a sofa when a girl he's just moved in with offers Bob Dylan the bed, with her in it. Boyd, generous then and now, says: "What, in the spring of 1964, when his Bobness was king of the folk world, could I say?" He's equally compassionate when writing of those who hit the casualty list; Jimi Hendrix, Nick Drake, and Syd Barrett.

But Boyd stays sharp on sixties zeitgeist, his words zipping up the times and the way they were 'a-changin'. "The tide of history was with us" says Boyd "and music was the key."