‘The past beats inside me like a second heart,’ says widow and art historian Max Morden in John Banville’s 2005 novel The Sea. He has returned to the seaside village of his childhood, where he first experienced love, in all its gentleness and brutality; re-imagining this personal enclave,...

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...

Twelve or thirteen hours into the flight from Glasgow to Christchurch on New Zealand’s South Island the will to live starts to evaporate. It had taken seven hours to reach Dubai, through whose labyrinthine airport we marched to our gate as if to an appointment with an amateur dentist. Where were all...

MURIEL Spark, the centenary of whose birth we celebrate in this special issue of the Scottish Review of Books, left her native heath in 1937 not knowing when, if ever, she was likely to return. She was still a teenager and eager to see what lay beyond Edinburgh’s vertiginous tenements, greasy, gleaming...