“Whenever a friend succeeds,” said Gore Vidal, “a little something in me dies.” I thought of that when Nicola Sturgeon, having finally been cleared by Police Scotland’s Operation Branchform, said she hopes now to concentrate on things she is passionate about, notably “writing and the book world”.

With her memoir, Frankly, coming out in August, she will be pitched swiftly into what Muriel Spark liked to call “the world of books”. It was not meant fondly. I doubt much will faze Sturgeon about speaking in public or fielding awkward or adoring questions from her audiences. But despite being friends with novelists, is she entirely prepared for what becoming a writer entails?

Vidal’s barbed but honest remark gives only a hint of how competitive and backstabbing a business it can be. That’s not just the case in the stratospheric level he inhabited, where his rivals included the likes of Truman Capote and Norman Mailer. (“Great career move,” he said, on hearing of Capote’s death.) Even in the middle and lower ranks of literary endeavour, writers can be consumed with envy and bitterness. I’ve met less venomous rattlesnakes.

You might ask if such a competitive environment can possibly be worse than the bear-pits of Holyrood or Westminster, or the moronic trolling politicians such as Sturgeon must endure. The good news is, it’s not anything like as nasty. Nevertheless, with reputations, status and above all income at stake, authors can be unexpectedly savage. Indeed, the less money they make, the more vicious they can be.

“Why, if I’m so famous, am I so........

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