James Baldwin said that ‘painters have often taught writers how to see’. One could argue that every time John Byrne sits down to paint a picture his writerly imagination is being nurtured. His plays have a vibrancy, wildness and precise detail evident in his earliest primitive paintings. Byrne excels...

Modern crime writing is guilty of various misdemeanours. One is the creation of male detectives who bear a remarkable similarity to each other. Denise Mina is a writer who bucks the trend.

Publishing is a precarious business, not least because significant capital must first be spent before any of it starts to trickle back. Every book is a gamble and few are the ones that turn into gold. Yet publishers are often portrayed not as philanthropists or bulwarks against philistinism but as chancers...

Here at the Scottish Review of Books we choose our heroes carefully. One such is Richard Hoggart. His is not a name, we acknowledge, which will be familiar to many readers, even those of a ‘certain’ age. But to many baby boomers Hoggart epitomized an era – the two decades immediately following...