It is one of the mysteries of human endeavour that a Golden Age is only recognised when it has passed. Like happiness, it appears in the rearview mirror. When it is in full swing, insiders are oblivious, but with hindsight, what seemed like the usual grind and turmoil can be seen as a halcyon period...
Call it serendipity, but even as Annalena McAfee’s new book Hame – an exploration of language and identity centred on a fictional island poet – was being posted out to reviewers, the country was, once again, getting itself all het up about the alleged politicisation of the Scots tongue.
You can get too much Sherlock Holmes. I once met the editor of a magazine called The Holmesian Observer. I read the Complete Sherlock Holmes while growing up, so I took an interest. Holmesian Observer? Looks good, I remarked innocently. The guy said, Actually it’s pronounced Holmeeesian.
‘Writing is what I steal from the usual flow of things,’ Burnside wrote recently in the Guardian, describing working through the enforced wakefulness of sleep-disordered nights. Goodness knows how much he would produce if his writing life was perfect.
A man walks into the Mitchell Library: Reader: Have you got a book on Glasgow, mister? Librarian: Aye, 4000! Reader: Well, it’s the north of the city. Librarian: Oh, aye, here, there’s this, there’s that. Reader: It’s round about Maryhill. Librarian: Well, there’s a wee history of it. Reader:...
In Dilys Rose’s graceful and elliptical fiction, the mundane reality of everyday life is often a kind of spiritual and intellectual prison. Mothers and children, wives and husbands, drifters who never go anywhere – all her disparate characters are united by a sense that real life is happening elsewhere,...
I’ve been moving house, for the second time in sixteen months. Bad enough once every two or three decades, and not to be recommended. Six containers arrived out of storage, and four men to unload and carry up to the top floor, with the remainder of the Stuff being directed into the tandem garage (one...
Judging by the curtained stage at the back, Clydebank Town Hall was envisioned as a place suitable for theatre productions, but standards change and the touring group who put on The Cause of Thunder did not consider the proscenium stage serviceable for a show like theirs, which invites intimacy, not...
Including The Recovery Room, How Music Travels, Wildflower Hunt, The Field and Midsummer Sundial
On a cold February morning two years ago, Gordon Brown held a press conference on the top floor of the Doubletree Hotel in Edinburgh. Framed by a bright, clear view of the capital’s skyline, with the castle forbidding in the distance, the former prime minister launched – once more – into the constitutional...
Hanging on the staircase wall of my grandmother’s house in Wick there was a sepia-tinted photograph of Wick harbour in its heyday, chock-a-block with fishing boats and schooners and with quaysides lined with thousands of barrels. She loved to tell us that in those days (the late nineteenth century)...
As epigraph to his poem ‘The Commonplace’, Brian Johnstone offers these words, translated from the Latin of Horace: The jar will long retain the fragrance Of what it was steeped in when new. His memoir Double Exposure bears out, in its progression, its technique and in its highly controlled but...
I seem to remember that this originally came out as ‘the uncensored memoirs of John Calder’. New readers shouldn’t be concerned that the paperback second edition has been toned down in any way. There’s still plenty of action. Pursuit perhaps belongs to the same tradition of intellectual libertinism...