William Hamilton’s name became known to the general public in 1976 through Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene.  Written to popularize recent discoveries in Darwinian evolution, this book claimed these were mainly due to Hamilton. Some biologists questioned these discoveries in the following years,...

Earlier this year Kenneth White appeared at Aberdeen University’s Mayfestival, giving a lecture on ‘world literature’  and a poetry reading: at both events new books by him were launched, Ideas of Order at Cape Wrath, a set of essays on cultural renewal, and Latitudes and Longitudes, his first...

Nancy Brysson Morrison is best known for her 1933 novel The Gowk Storm, though, in fact, she is little known these days even for that. Despite an active writing career spanning over 40 years in which she kept up an industrious output of novels, non-fiction books, stories and journalism, and despite...

The most famous door in stage history, the one through which Nora – in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House – will exit to detach herself from her family and good society to claim her life for herself alone, is situated on the right as the audience enters. Attached firmly to it, and well in view, is the letter...

The name is misleading. Laidlaw. Makes you think of a man of certainties, of cast-iron convictions, someone who lays the law. William McIlvanney’s detective hero, Jack Laidlaw, is distinguished, however, from the ever-multiplying scrum of fictional sleuths by his uncertainty. ‘The most certain thing...

Neil Mackay’s debut novel is more Natural Born Killers than What Maisie Knew but it does have its Jamesian turn, and its Jamesian problem. The most problematic of all the windows in what the Master called the House of Fiction is the knee-high one that looks out of, and lets light into, the nursery....