Peter Nelson Obituary
Peter Nelson’s style was affable and urbane and it was a terrible shock when he died last year aged forty-eight. Friendships were important to him and towards the end of his illness he observed it was...
View ArticleBooked for Life
By any standards, John Sibbald’s career in the world of books has been extraordinary. At the age of thirteen, it was his habit to devote every Saturday morning to going round the Edinburgh secondhand...
View ArticleEric Morten Interview
I first met Eric Morten at the 2002 PBFA Edinburgh Festival Book Fair. He had just emerged from a power nap on the floor under a table, where he had been shielded from view by a green baize cloth. He...
View ArticleRevisioning Highland Art
Highland Art: A Window to the West departs from conventional approaches to Scottish art. How did this publication come about? It was the result of the annual exhibition last year at the Royal Scottish...
View ArticleNaipaul Mapped
Life lived as polemic. That’s one way to see V.S. Naipaul, through the lens of Patrick French’s brilliant account of a writer whose identity has been forged in the struggle against stereotyping and...
View ArticleCircus
When I was a little girl I dreamed that one day I would join a circus and be the lady on the flying trapeze. It wasn’t to be. I get dizzy if I stand on a chair. My long-forgotten, sequinned dream came...
View ArticleRemembering
JR What sort of books particularly impressed themselves on your imagination when you were a boy? AG The books that excited me dramatically also excited me visually – as did children’s comics, the...
View ArticleColin MacKay 1951-2003
It seems from the letters that Colin MacKay posted to friends on the eve of his suicide that living and writing had become intolerable burdens. That he considered himself to be a failure as a writer...
View ArticleInterview with Iain Orr
‘Biodiplomat’ Iain Orr, a former British Consul-General in Shanghai, shares his thoughts on diversity, islands and albatrosses. Scientists still do not appear to understand sufficiently that all earth...
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