I first read him as a teenager in search of something saucier than Peveril of the Peak. My gateway to his oeuvre was a novel called A Stone For Danny Fisher, which was first published in 1952. Like so many of Robbins’s books this became a movie, King Creole, starring Elvis Presley. I then graduated to what we might label his magnum opus, The Carpetbaggers, published in 1961, which grabbed me like a noose from its first sentence: “The sun was beginning to fall from the sky into the white Nevada desert as Reno came up beneath me.” Who, I immediately wanted to know, was Reno and what was he, she or it, doing beneath whoever “me” was?

The Carpetbaggers is as fat as War and Peace, which is perhaps where the comparison should end. Its hero is called Jonas Cord, Jr., who is un grand fromage in the airline and movie business. The plot, which covers a couple of decades, moves at a lick as Cord wheels and deals, and hops into bed like a flea flitting from one cowpat to another. Robbins, it must be said, seemed not to believe anything was untoward with any of this. His characters live for today and take whatever comes their way. They might not be completely morally bankrupt but they are maxing out their credit cards. Aficionados of his prose go in search of choice sentences like hunters scouring that Tuscan undergrowth for truffles. Here’s one: “I felt her shudder and tremble under me and a shrill scream came from her wings”. And another: “Finish your whisky while I get my dress off.”

No longer having a copy of The Carpetbaggers, I am grateful for these examples to Ian Parker who, in 1996, wrote a profile of Robbins for The New Yorker. Robbins was then 80 and living with his 45-year-old wife Jann - otherwise known as Tootsie - in Palm Springs, California. Parker described his subject as “popular”, which was something of an understatement. Total sales of his books were at estimated to be 750 million; at one point he was said to be selling 40,000 copies a day. This may not be as many as the Bible but if you were to make me choose between rereading it and The Carpetbaggers I wouldn’t need to think twice. As for JKR, she has still a long way to go before she reaches Robbins’s tally. Not bad for someone who said of himself: “I’m the world’s greatest writer in basic English.”

Try as he might to get at the truth, Parker found Robbins to be evasive when talking of himself. Apparently, his early years were spent in a Catholic orphanage in Hell’s Kitchen, New York. Paul Gitlin, his former agent and friend, said his father was Jewish who married a woman who wanted children of her own and regarded Robbins as superfluous. When he was eight or so he was adopted by a Jewish family who moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan. He thought them “lovely” but he was badly behaved. “I used to deliver cocaine to Cole Porter,” he told Parker. Then, when twelve or thirteen, he began to attend burlesque shows favoured by dirty old men. “I would get a quarter to jerk them off,” Robbins recalled. “You know, I made a dollar, a dollar and a half, and I had enough money for the day.” There is more in similar vein which I’ll spare you.

And so it goes. There was a spell in the Navy following which he had various occupations and ventures, one of which proved lucrative. Money came and went, which is a theme of Robbins’ career. When he was in the money he spent it, on yachts (several), houses (ditto), Rolls-Royces (nine), a Lear Jet (shared with Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis , Jr.) women (innumerable), wives (one, three or five depending on who’s testifying), parties. He was not a bad looking fellow despite Parker’s description of his face looking like Gore Vidal’s with all the air let out. Picasso, a friend, drew him. Others who knew and liked him were James Baldwin, John Steinbeck and Norman Mailer.

According to legend, he became a writer after he made a bet with the Head of Production at Universal studio that he could better the kind of stories the company was paying a mint for. From this came his debut novel, Never Love a Stranger, which was Robbins’s own favourite. Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather, said he could have been a serious literary writer if he’d wanted to be. “A Stone for Danny Fisher was a literary book. But Harold was a smart guy, and he knew he was going to starve to death if he kept writing like that.”

He bashed out more than twenty novels, some of which pass muster, others which shouldn’t have passed go. No one knows exactly how many he actually wrote because as the years progressed his inclination to work faltered. Desperate, his publishers persuaded him (with the promise of a yacht among other furbelows) to put his name to books of which he was only titularly the author. What sold - what still sells - is sex, and Robbins, writing post Chatterley, Portnoy’s Complaint and Henry Miller’s Tropics, gave the public what it wanted, and then some. One of his admirers was Jackie Collins, who told me how big a fan she was of him. Like Robbins, she had no delusions about the company she kept. She did not want to be Proust or Joyce; they could have posterity, she wanted fame and fortune now. Jackie and Harold were peas from the same pod, dedicated disciples of the Johnsonian adage that no one but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.

I think he was joking. There again, perhaps not. After all, this was a Scotland team featuring the likes of Kenny Dalglish, Graeme Souness, Archie Gemmill, toothless - in a dental sense - Joe Jordan and Kenny Burns. All we had to do was make it out of a group featuring Peru, Iran and the Netherlands. Vintage Scotland fans will not need to be reminded how things panned out. Peru thumped us 3-1, Iran held us to a 1-1 draw (or was it the other way round?) and, better late than never, we battered the Netherlands 3-2, including a goal by Gemmill that many rate on a par with the best of Pele, Maradona and Messi. You may like to add Ronaldo, but has he ever slalomed between defenders like the balletic Archie?

It was an inglorious campaign, the reverberations of which were far reaching. Is it too much to suggest that the failure the following year of the devolution referendum was a result of Ally’s Tartan Army’s inability to live up to expectations? How different things might have been. Lest anyone forget, the Netherlands proceeded to the final of the competition, where they took host nation Argentina to extra time before succumbing to a 3-1 defeat. Who’s to say Scotland could not have done better.

All of which brings me to a collection of poems by Alan Bold. Never one to miss an opportunity to score, ‘Boldie’ published a collection of poems to appeal to the footballing masses before they set off for the other side of the planet. Scotland, Yes: World Cup Football Poems contained some forty poems, a number of which were published in the much-missed Weekend Scotsman. It is fair to say that the literati were unimpressed, and when the paper’s letters page filled with howls of outrage from affronted readers, it was left to Hugh MacDiarmid no less to defend his pal and future biographer.

The following poem, titled ‘Peruvian Nursery Rhyme’, may give you an idea of what the book contained.

Poor poor Peru

If you only knew

What the boys in Blue

Are going to do to you!

Too true!

Should you wish to delve deeper, a paperback copy of Scotland, Yes: World Cup Football Poems is available from Amazon for £98.50.

Haiti here we come.

Nor, it seems, was I alone in not registering him. Following his admission of guilt, there have been numerous ‘The Peter Murrell I Knew’ pieces, almost all of which amount to a hill of beans. One sympathises, for here is a man who was at the core of Nationalist success for decades, who was critical to Salmond’s election as SNP leader and ascent to First Minister, yet of whom there is vanishingly little to report.

Take, for instance, David Torrance’s admirably thorough book, Salmond: Against the Odds. In its 300-plus pages, there are just seven references to Mr Murrell, none of which could be described as significant. He is named in lists and quoted cursorily, and then fades into the background despite the fact that he had been the party’s Chief Executive since 2001.

All of this changed when in 2010 he married Nicola Sturgeon, the most famous Scottish woman since Mary, Queen of Scots. I say ‘all’ but how much really did change? While she was ubiquitous Mr Murrell was by and large inconspicuous. They would go together to a polling station and would be seen holding hands at official functions and chatting amiably. For the most part they seemed as happily married as any couple in the public eye. And so they were as far as we can tell until he and she were arrested as part of Operation Branchform and he was subsequently charged.

That, as Ms Sturgeon has said, was one of the worst days of her life. There have been a few more of these during the past decade or so, among them the arrest and trial (and acquittal) of Salmond, her erstwhile mentor and promoter. Their falling out has been described as the stuff of Shakespearian tragedy, though no one says which tragedy - Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet, take your pick.

It is hard to keep up with every twist and turn of a saga that is unlikely to end soon. At some point, however, Mr Murrell will have his say as will Ms Sturgeon. Like the rest of us, she says she does not recognise the man she married and that she had no knowledge of his wanton accumulation of Mont Blanc pens, salt and pepper grinders and thousand-pound coffee makers. As someone who swears by Bialetti’s stove-top coffee pots (available on occasion on discount at TK Maxx), I am intrigued by Mr Murrell’s purchase of not one but three machines. I am similarly intrigued by his wife’s insistence that she either knew nothing of such purchases or that she believed he had the means to buy them with his own money. We do know, though, that, speaking on Desert Island Discs, Ms Sturgeon chose a coffee machine as her luxury. We also know - because she said so - that she did not spend a lot of time in her kitchen. And we know, too, because her friend Ian Blackford said so, that “Nicola does not have a passion for cooking, it’s not something she does.”

Many women - a few of whom I know - embrace that sentiment. It does not make them bad people, as it does not make Nicola Sturgeon a bad person. Muriel Spark regarded cooking as a flagrant waste of time and - on the advice of her mother - determined to have nothing to do it with it if at all possible. Still, surely even the least domestic of goddesses would have noticed coffee makers coming and going and perhaps raised an eyebrow at their appearance, disappearance and reappearance.

I am making a meal of this because Ms Sturgeon has said previously that once shot of politics she would like to morph into a novelist. Her love of books is one of her most appealing traits. I cheered when she said, “I wish more political leaders read fiction,” because it increases their empathy and understanding of people.

One would love to hear how she might relate this to her current travails and the mysterious Mr Murrell. The best fiction writers are perceptive, observant and curious about the world around them and are constantly watching, eavesdropping, interpreting and trying to make sense of things. Nothing much escapes their gaze. Their senses are more finely tuned than those of other mortals. They look and learn and are alive to that which feels suspect.

That Ms Sturgeon did not appreciate that her husband was acting oddly suggests she is not yet ready to embrace a fiction writing career. This is a pity since she has boundless material at her disposal. If nothing else, the Scottish Parliament from its reconvening has been a source of one drama after another, as First Ministers came and went, sometimes ingloriously, and countless MSPs of all stripes have succumbed to human frailty. That none of this has been reflected in serious literature is baffling. Aren’t any of our novelists capable of tackling the subject and transforming it into a Caledonian version of Bonfire of the Vanities? Anyone interested should apply for a grant from the always benevolent Cremative Scotland.

It was April, Easter newly past, and warm with cloudless blue skies. Around the Duomo crowds mustered in their thousands in preparation for an ascent of Brunelleschi’s masterpiece. In a side-street a tenor, performing without accompaniment, offered a selection of Puccini’s greatest hits. Crossing the Ponte Vecchio, the sole bridge over the Arno spared Hitler’s bombardment, death-defying selfie-takers plonked themselves on the parapet. Meanwhile, on the other bank of the busy river, the queue for the Pitti Palace and the Boboli Gardens stretched the length of Leith Walk.

Do not think I am complaining as people have done for aeons about the number of tourists in what is by contemporary standards a compact city. It has long been thus. In A Room with a View (1908), EM Forster enjoyed himself at the expense of English visitors who colonised Florence as if adding it to the spoils of Empire. In the novel, native Italians, when mentioned at all, are bit players or derided (“a most unpleasant people”). What the English interlopers have come to experience is the art, which for some soon begins to pall and makes them eager to be gone.

Back then, you did not take selfies to remind you of your trip; you amassed souvenirs - picture frames, “cheap mosaic brooches” (which would do for the maids’ Christmas presents), “pins, pots, heraldic saucers, brown art-photographs; Eros and Psyche in alabaster; St Peter to match - all of which would have cost less in London.” Nothing much changes, I reflected, as we wandered among the leather goods stalls around the Mercato Centrale. It’s getting on for forty years since I bought a leather jacket here and it’s still in one piece. Barring some catastrophe it should see me out.

The same might be said of Florence’s allure, especially when talking of writers. Historians of the city are divided about whether Chaucer ever visited but if he did he was in the vanguard. What we do know is that his Canterbury Tales is deeply indebted to the work of Dante (1265-1321), Petrarch (1304-1374) and Boccaccio (1313-1375). The influence of Dante in particular, both on the Italian language and the letters of other nations, is incalculable and surely encouraged writers from all parts of the globe to troop to Tuscany. Since then, the traffic has been pretty much nonstop. So much so that it is perhaps easier to say who has not had Florence on their itinerary than who has.

As we revisited old haunts and new we happened upon plaques commemorating sojourns by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Fyodor Dostoevsky, who rented rooms in the Via Guicciardi, while writing his novel, The Idiot, and complained bitterly about how cold they were in winter. In the Pitti Palace, which was just across the street, he was entranced by Raphael’s Madonna della Seggiola - The Madonna of the Chair. It is still there and still a thing of enigmatic beauty. Whoever was Raphael’s model for Madonna seems to look coyly at us, as if she would rather be elsewhere. As for her child, he looks as if he’s been stuffing himself with pasta.

My favourite part of this city of stout doors, deep walls, barred windows and terracotta roofs is San Spirito, which relatively few tourists seek out. The piazza is dominated by the church of Santo Spirito, which was designed by the aforementioned Brunelleschi two years before his death. It was another forty years before it was completed. In one of the best books in English about Florence, Christopher Hibbert’s Florence: The Biography of a City (1993), there is a drawing of the church in front of which is a floral abundance. If this was ever the case it is not how things are today. On a Saturday morning, there were a few stalls selling fruit and vegetables, costume jewellery, ‘vintage’ clothes and communist propaganda. No one was sitting at the tables outside the cafe where we were fleeced on a previous occasion. On the other side of the square is another and better cafe frequented by locals where we took our cappuccinos in the early morning sun.

Near San Spirito is San Frediano which in another era was down-at-heel. In that regard it is to Florence what Trastevere is to Rome. Its best-known writer is Vasco Pratolini (1913-1991). Though his infant years were spent in the Santa Croce neighbourhood, Pratolini is umbilically associated with the Oltrarno - the other side of the Arno - and San Frediano, which he memorialised in several novels, of which Metello (1955) may be his masterpiece — I’m ashamed to say I have yet to read it. “San Frediano,” he wrote, “is the unhealthiest section of the city; in the heart of its streets, as densely populated as ant-hills, are located the Central Refuse Dump, the public dormitory, the barracks. The greater part of its slums is the home of rag-pickers, and of those who cook the intestines of cattle to make their living from them and from the broth that is their product.”

This was San Frediano in the 1950s, since when it has been gentrified and become home to artists and artisans, antique dealers and political agitators. There are still butchers selling tripe but there are as many bespoke tailors and shoemakers. My introduction to the area came through the crime novels of Lancashire-born Magdalen Nabb (1947-2007). One of a fêted few writers to be praised by Georges Simenon, she made her home in Florence in 1975. She fell in with the carabinieri, one of whom, a “big sad fat man who cried all the time” because he was allergic to sun and had always to wear sunglasses, became the model for her detective, the lugubrious Marshal Salvatore Guarnaccia. He and Maigret, one feels, would enjoy each other’s company.

In 1993, I visited ‘Magda’ in her modest apartment in San Frediano. On the rooftop we had a glass or two of wine until it was time go to a restaurant, where we shared a table with her fellow Sanfrediani, her source material. Like the man on whom he was based, Nabb said, Marshal Guarnaccia seemed never to smile. Why she couldn’t say. As she told another interviewer: “I’ve known him now since 1980. We are very old friends. I say, ‘For God’s sake smile for me’.”

So far, so what? But what distinguishes Caudwell from the oligarchs, sheiks, influencers, celebs and Eurotrash who, one suspects, will be his neighbours, is that he has hired a bookseller, Nicky Dunne of Heywood Hill Books, to “curate” - aaaargh - a library for him.

According to the Times’ hyperventilating hack, no one seems prepared to reveal how much Dunne is charging for his services though what he does say is: “A library is, say, £250,000 which is, of course, a lot of money - but compared to the price of contemporary art or even old art for some of these people, it’s really…it’s maybe one picture. And yet it seems to me that the library should be as important as the art on the walls.”

Amen to that. But what is not clear here is whether the quarter of a million is the sum set aside for the purchase of books or for Dunne’s expertise in choosing them. What we were told, however, is that Caudwell’s library will consist of 1,000 books, which he “in typically hyperbolic terms” mentioned in the same breath as the libraries of Aristotle, Alexandria, Pavlovsk (St Petersburg), Congress (c. 30 million books) and the Bodleian (a mere 11 million).

Predictably, the comments below the Times’ piece tended towards the derogatory. “I do hope the books are better written and more comprehensible than this article,” steamed one nitpicker. “These philistines don’t read,” raged another, “what is all this ‘curated’ carry on about?” “Bit of a stretch comparing a library filled with £250k of books to the Bodleian,” sniffed yet another. I was surprised, though, that no one felt it necessary to query the content of Caudwell’s collection which seems, from what he told the newspaper, to be confined to non-fiction books about London and novels set in London written by born Londoners or writers living in the Great Wen.

This did not suggest that Caudwell’s ‘library’ is likely to compare to those libraries mentioned earlier. But each to their own. What concerns me most about this venture is the idea that you can commission someone else to acquire books for you, which brings to mind those numpties who buy books by the yard simply to furnish a room and impress the gullible. To be effective these books need to look as if they have at least been opened. Perhaps Dunne will offer Caudwell an enhanced service similar to that envisaged by the great Flann O’Brien in the Irish Times in which, for an additional fee, books can be made to look as if they have been read. I should say at this point that if there is anyone out there who would like to emulate Caudwell do not hesitate to contact me. I may even be prepared to undercut Dunne’s estimate by a hundred thousand or two.

My own library, which is also my wife’s, has been decades in the making and consists - at a rough estimate - of some 20,000 books. A more exact figure is hard to determine because most of the shelves are double-banked. When I am called upon to explain why I have so many books I fall back on the excuse of a fellow bibliomaniac who always insisted that his collection was “a working library”. In the beginning, when I was younger and more impoverished, I bought books whenever I had a spare bob or two as a hedge against boredom. In my irrational mind, I foresaw a time when humanity’s existence would be threatened by the boredom equivalent of armageddon, when one would have no access to libraries or bookshops. Then, when all around me were suffering from terminal ennui, I would be smugly unaffected.

A personal library is organic and no two are alike. It is also, as Alberto Manguel, the bibliophile’s bibliophile, says in Packing My Library (2018), a form of autobiography, albeit one that may be difficult for the uninitiated to follow. Like Manguel, I have books that have been with me through most of my life. I know where they were bought and when, and sometimes I find tucked between their covers letters, postcards, business cards, scribbled notes, train and theatre tickets, restaurant bills and other ephemera which help jog my memory and send me down the chute of time in search of a lost self.

Year by year, title by title, the books accumulated. Having lived with them so long, I usually know where to find one at a moment’s notice. Unlike in a public library, which is arranged to allow all readers to locate a book they’re looking for, my library serves only the needs of my wife and me. To an untrained eye it may all look haphazard but it is not. It’s just that it’s ordered to suit our needs. Like Manguel, I rarely loan books, though I am always happy to gift them. What pains me, however, is when I recall giving away a book that was once prized but which I thought I would never read again. How I yearn to have it returned to its rightful place. Similarly, I have lost sleep over a book that I know is somewhere in this house but which remains at large. One such is the Collected Novels (Stoner, Butcher’s Crossing, Augustus) of John Williams published by Library of America. Where has it gone? Where might it be? Do get in touch if you have any light to shed.

One section in my library, a surprisingly large one, is devoted to books about books, which is where Packing My Library resides. Manguel’s library contains 35,000 volumes and his book about its removal from one rather large house to another much smaller one makes for painful reading. I recommend it to Mr Caudwell and anyone who believes it is possible to delegate the creation of a library. What Manguel says goes for me too: “I’ve often felt that my library explained who I was, gave me a shifting self that transformed itself constantly throughout the years.”

Salinger’s hero is Holden Caulfield, the archetypal teenager; irreverent, über-sensitive, smart (but not academically so), obsessed with sex and wayward in a world governed by pernickety adults. “I flunked you in history,” one teacher tells him, “because you knew absolutely nothing.” Had he even opened a textbook? “I sort of glanced through it a couple of times,” Holden lies, not wanting to hurt the teacher’s feelings. As for books, he is drawn to those that are “at least funny once in a while”. One such is Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native, which is not known for its belly-laughs. I’m assuming this is one of Salinger’s little jokes.

Catcher has one of the great opening passages, which not only grabs you by the scruff of the neck, it sets the perfect tone for what is about to follow: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t like feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them. They’re quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father.”

Here, then, is a writer who gives voice not only to his spunky narrator but to numberless young folk yet to discover who they are and what their prospects might be. I can’t exactly recall when I first read it but it has remained one of those novels that demands to be read every now and then, as one might make an effort to keep in touch with a friend who’s close to dropping off the Christmas card list.

Catcher’s appeal is due in some measure to the mystique that surrounds its author. As everyone ought to know, Salinger is as well known for his desire to disappear from view as for his famous novel. From the outset he shunned publicity, insisted that dust jackets of his books were unillustrated, and offered autobiographical notes that gave away as little as possible about himself. Three cheers to all that! On the back flap of Franny and Zooey (1961), he wrote: “It is my rather subversive opinion that a writer’s feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second-most valuable property on loan to him during his working years. My wife has asked me to add, however, in a single explosion of candor, that I live in Westport with my dog.”

Such singular, ironic explosions of candor, however, were taken as an invitation by literary gumshoes to besiege Salinger’s privacy. One such was Ian Hamilton, whose In Search of J.D. Salinger (1988) is described as a “biography”. It is no such thing. Attempting (and failing) to do for Salinger what A.J.A. Symons did for Frederick Rolfe in The Quest for Corvo (1934), a truly great biography, Hamilton contrived to portray himself as a prurient, money-grabbing bloodsucker who can’t comprehend why Salinger wants nothing to do with him.

The problem - one of many - with books like In Search of J.D. Salinger is that on first reading you are inclined to accept as fact seemingly innocuous and uncontroversial assertions. I have learned to be more questioning. One example must suffice: Hamilton repeats, without attempting to investigate, that Salinger’s mother, “Marie Jillich”, was “Scotch-born”. She was not. Her name was not Jillich but Jellech and she was born not on some heather-clad heath but in Iowa in 1891.

I discovered this when researching a lecture I agreed - impetuously! - to give many years ago about Salinger and Scotland at the much-lamented Word Festival in Aberdeen. Like a house built on porridge, the lecture was not based on the securest of foundations and any hope I had of claiming Salinger for one of us lacked evidence. Still, there was an hour to fill and I pressed on shamelessly. I started with the novel’s title, which is taken from the poem ‘Comin Thro the Rye’ by Robert Burns. Holden - not the most reliable of narrators - manages to misquote a line, misremembering “Gin a body meet a body” as “if a body catch a body”, which in the context of the poem (and the novel, too, perhaps) is of some significance.

On I burbled, desperately seeking to slip a kilt on Salinger. I recalled how my friend Alastair Reid had got to know “Jerry” when he was teaching at Sarah Lawrence College. Coincidentally, Salinger was dating a girl there. When Catcher was about to be published he asked Alastair where he might go to avoid being caught up in the hoopla. Alastair recommended decamping to Scotland, for who would think to look for him there? Salinger duly did, spending ten days on the west coast - Rothesay, Oban, Tobermory, Stornaway? - in a B&B whose landlady attempted “to kill him with kindness”. Later, after everyone on the planet had been introduced to Holden Caulfield, and Salinger had gone to live in Cornish, New Hampshire, Alastair would travel up from New York to spend a few hours with him. The deal was that Salinger would wait at an agreed spot at noon but if Alastair did not show up at the appointed hour Catcher’s creator would be gone.

By now, I could sense that my audience - not huge - were beginning to shift in their seats. Salinger, I argued, desperately trying to hold their attention, was in many ways as much in the dark about his antecedents as we were. From what I had been able to discover, he had inherited his secretiveness from his parents who, for whatever reason, rarely spoke about their pasts. It may well be, therefore, that he mistakenly believed he had a drop of tartan blood in his veins. Or not as the case may very well be. The word ‘phony’ - one of Holden’s favourites - springs embarrassingly to mind.

The book to which the New York Herald Tribune was referring is The Alexandria Quartet, comprising Justine (1957), Balthazar (April, 1958), Mountolive (October, 1958) and Clea (1960). Love in its myriad forms is the theme of this weblike narrative in which an itinerant cast of exotic and louche characters overlaps - to put it euphemistically - and events are described from multiple points of view. We are in Alexandria in Egypt in the years before and during the Second World War. Here’s how Durrell introduces it: “Five races, five languages, a dozen creeds: five fleets turning through their greasy reflections behind the harbour bar. But there are more than five sexes and only demotic Greek seems to distinguish among them. The sexual provender which lies to hand is staggering in its variety and profusion. You would never mistake it for a happy place.”

When, half a century and more ago, I first read that passage, I was immediately hooked as if on hashish. The pages were full of sensuous imagery; heat, dust, the incessant sound of cicadas, the earthy smell of human bodies, the blinding glare of the sun, the languid movement of time. It was the embodiment of bohemianism and as remote from my Scottish backwater as it was possible to imagine. Then there was Durrell’s style which seemed imbued with the intensity of Joyce, Proust and Woolf, though perhaps not in that order, and a vocabulary that demonstrated prolonged immersion in the Oxford English Dictionary. What on earth did ‘pegamoid’ mean? Soon I was flipping through my own rather smaller dictionary in search - unsuccessfully - of enlightenment.

I chose to write my Sixth Year Studies dissertation on The Alexandria Quartet, to which my English teacher, who had last read a novel when Sir Walter Scott was in his pomp, responded by emitting spittle. This may have been a measure of her disgust or evidence of a dental problem - her teeth were as widely spaced as the standing stones of Callanish. For her Durrell was the devil incarnate, his obsession with sex a harbinger of the downfall of civilisation. The Swinging Sixties may have been coming to an end but they had had only a negative impact on her. She was a bona fide ‘Doctor’, which meant she was permitted to wear a black cloak, which made her look like one of the traitors on the eponymous TV show. Funny how such things stick in your mind. What she made perfectly clear was that she did not approve of me; ditto Durrell.

Long after I left school I remained faithful to him. At one point he produced books faster than I had the means to buy them, all acquired, by the way, from Thins on Edinburgh’s South Bridge. After The Alexandria Quartet came Tunc (an anagram of you-know-what), published in 1968, and its sequel Nunquam (1970), which was followed by The Avignon Quintet, which consists of Monsieur (1974), Livia (1978), Constance (1982), Sebastian (1983) and Quinx (1985), which a fellow fan of Durrell - of whom there are too few - prefers to The Alexandrian Quartet. I’m not sure I would go that far but reopening the Quintet recently I was struck by its author’s seductive voice and its rejoicing in simile and metaphor and poetic descriptiveness.

Not everyone, though, was as enchanted. Margaret Drabble alludes to this in her entry on Durrell in The Oxford Companion to English Literature (1998). His style, she notes, “is ornate, lyrical, and sensual, perhaps too much so for English tastes”. Then there is his “disregard for British respect for realism”, which some of us - i.e. me - would argue is a good thing. In hindsight, it is perhaps possible to see in Durrell the coming of writers such as Salman Rushdie, whose work is the antithesis of Aga sagas, kitchen sink dramas and - pace Ms Drabble - the Hampstead novel.

Ironically, Durrell managed to be both insider and outsider, intrinsically English - a number of his books draw on his (hilarious) experience of the diplomatic corps - and determinedly foreign. Among other things, he is a fabulous travel writer and self-professed islomane, who is drawn to islands as some are to mountains and others to the Poles. Prospero’s Cell (1945) describes life in pre-war Crete, Reflections on a Marine Venus (1953), which I am currently rereading, tells of his time as an Information Officer in Rhodes, and Bitter Lemons (1957) is an enduring paean to Cyprus.

Place is of paramount importance in Durrell’s oeuvre. He seems always to be on the move, always on a quest for the elusive. The travel books are dated but for me this adds to their charm. The islands he describes may still be thrre physically but in virtually every other respect they have changed beyond recognition, wrecked by over-tourism and all that comes with it.

A final thought. I would like to have met Durrell but never did. Apparently, he was a gregarious fellow, short of stature but in no way small, who could talk the hind legs off a donkey and was never afraid to speak his mind. He attended the famous Writers’ Conference in Edinburgh in 1962. Also present was Muriel Spark, and I once asked her if she’d crossed paths with him. She had. In fact, she said, she had accompanied him to Lothian Road where there was a fish and chip shop she could recommend. Beyond that Muriel had nothing to add.

The movie is adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel of the same title. At its core is the theory that Shakespeare was inspired to write the play following the death of his son Hamnet. As theories go, this is all very well and good. Then again, it may be codswallop. Truth is, we just don’t know. That’s the trouble with someone like Shakespeare who, when in 1616 he shuffled off this mortal coil (apologies!), he neglected to leave behind an account of why he wrote what he did. Indeed, we do not even know for sure what he did write. Scholars even more eminent than me have spent their entire careers trying to decide which of the plays were definitely written by Shakespeare and which may not have been. Read any book on him and you will soon begin to notice the use of such equivocatory terms as ‘would’, ‘could’, ‘perhaps’ and ‘probably’, while phrases such as ‘seem to have’, ‘we cannot name for certain’, and ‘records are patchy’ abound.

This all adds to the Bard’s mystique. With so few facts about him there is room aplenty for novelistic speculation, not the least of which is how someone from such a relatively humble background rose to become the author of an oeuvre that overshadows all of English literature and whose reputation remains as vibrant today and as it was in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Prodigious does not do justice to the breadth and depth of his output. Decades ago, I invested - for a whopping £19.95 - in a one-volume edition of The Complete Works, which runs to some 1,500 double-column pages. Lifting it down from a shelf, I nearly gave myself a hernia. This volume only includes work that the editors, Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, are convinced were written by Shakespeare. But, as they acknowledge, there have also been a number of plays and poems that over the centuries were also - if wrongly - attributed to him.

No one, though, has ever accused Hamlet of being ‘sentimental goo’. A study in revenge, it is no tear jerker but a complex interrogation of the motives that propel one man to his demise. In that regard, Hamlet and Hamnet are artistic opposites. Hamnet places at its core Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife, whose name O’Farrell has changed to Agnes, and her son, Hamnet, who died in childhood. Where, apart from the similarity of the names, Hamnet fits into Hamlet’s story is not clear. What we do know is that the earliest source of the play is to be found in Historica Danica (1514) by the Danish chronicler Saxo Grammaticus (c.1150-c.1220), which, in the 1570s, was translated in Histoires tragiques by Pierre de Belleforest. It has been suggested that Shakespeare made an earlier attempt to turn this into a play around 1590, five or so years after Hamnet’s death. The tragedy we now recognise as Hamlet reached fruition c.1600.

Much ado - aha! - has been made of Hamlet’s title as the Prince of Denmark and of Elsinore, his home town, where - according to a tourist website - “you’ll find Hamlet’s castle, 400-year-old streets, an architectural masterpiece in a former ship dock, design shops and gastronomic experiences.” What you not will find, alas, is any evidence that someone called Shakespeare was ever there. Like Dunsinane Hill and Juliet’s balcony in Verona, Denmark and Elsinore are products of Shakespeare’s fecund imagination. For, as far as one can tell, he never had occasion to use a passport. Any travelling he did was local or in his mind. He was, it seems, an avid reader and could get by in a number of languages - Latin, Greek, French, Italian - and scoured texts and borrowed wantonly to transform into work for the stage. Pressure on him was high, as were expectations. When not writing, he was directing and acting. He was a man under the cosh and chained to a treadmill, hammering out one play after another to satisfy demand. Hamlet may ostensibly be set in Denmark but, as John Dover Wilson acknowledged in What Happens in Hamlet (originally published in 1935 and updated several times thereafter), substitute ‘England’ for ‘Denmark’ and you will have a better understanding of where Shakespeare was coming from.

I say ‘Shakespeare’, which I appreciate does not convince everyone, including Elizabeth Winkler, whose enjoyable essay, ‘Was Shakespeare a Woman?’, first appeared in The Atlantic and was republished in The Best American Essays 2020. As Winkler notes, there have been many candidates proposed as the author of Macbeth, King Lear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and - drum roll - Hamlet. Some of these are easily dismissed. As Winkler says, “Doubts about whether William Shakespeare…really wrote the works attributed to him are almost as old and as the writing itself.” Others, however, should be taken more seriously. Her chosen candidate to usurp him is one Emilia Bassano who, many moons ago, was plucked from obscurity by the Shakespeare scholar and professional Cornishman A.L. Rowse.

The circumstantial evidence in favour of Ms Bassano is superficially compelling; she was well-educated, well-travelled, well-connected (she knew someone who’d been to Denmark and may have encountered two chaps called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern!), a decent if unremarkable writer and - a clincher! - a woman who had first-hand experience of love’s labour’s lost. Delving deeper down the rabbit hole, Winkler concludes: “What would the revelation of a woman’s hand at work mean, aside from the loss of a prime tourist attraction in Stratford-upon-Avon? Would the effect be a blow to the cultural patriarchy, or the erosion of the canon’s status? Would (male) myths of inexplicable genius take a hit? Would women at last claim their rightful authority as historical and intellectual forces?” Here be so many ‘woulds’ it is nigh impossible to see the trees.

From Resurrection (1899) by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Rosemary Edmunds

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Though he is perhaps best known as a novelist, thanks to the libidinous Couples and the Rabbit series, he also wrote short stories (around 2,000), criticism (which helped him meet his alimony payments), essays (on golf, baseball and Mickey Mouse to name but a few), a play, a memoir, books for children, and several slim volumes of poetry. His last book, Endpoint and Other Poems, appeared shortly after he died. He was like a geyser that cannot stop spouting. Consequently, he was much envied by his peers for his prodigious output, and for his critical and commercial success, which rarely go together.

In this house of books, Updike seems to inhabit every room; on a shelf behind my desk are three volumes containing his thoughts on painting, on every page of which there is something to stimulate. It is a reminder that drawing was an early passion. As a teenager, he wrote fan letters to famous cartoonists, asking one if he could spare a picture “to alleviate the blankness of one of my bedroom walls.” Flattered, the artist was happy to comply.

The person to whom Updike wrote most often was his mother. Schiff reckons that he sent around 2,000 letters, postcards and notes to her. Linda Grace Hoyer (as she was before she married Updike’s father, a teacher) wanted desperately to be a writer, submitting countless stories to magazines which never accepted them. Thus from an early age her son was privy to the reality of rejection and humiliation which every writer must learn to bear. In 1943, when he was eleven, Updike was given a subscription to the New Yorker, in which he soon longed to see his name. Ten or so years later, after receiving hundreds of rejections himself, a poem was finally bought by the New Yorker. Schiff reproduces the telegram Updike sent his parents announcing his breakthrough. Oh to have been a fly on the wall when his mother opened it.

Inevitably, the New Yorker features significantly in his correspondence. When I was in my twenties, or was it my thirties - at some point the decades lose distinction - I took out a subscription and was always pleased to see Updike’s byline. By the time he became a regular contributor, its first and founding editor, Harold Ross, was no more and William Shawn, his trusted lieutenant, was in charge. In 1987, when Shawn was dispatched into unwanted retirement, Updike, like many involved with the magazine, was saddened and wrote to Shawn telling him of his gratitude. Robert Gottlieb, Shawn’s successor, did not last long and was replaced by Tina Brown, of whom Updike writes patronisingly: “I can still picture Tina in her little black dress and hear her incisive English voice twittering away. She made the magazine a happening, for better or worse.”

More to Updike’s taste was David Remnick, who took over in 1998 and is still there, piloting the magazine through this year’s hundredth anniversary and monstering the meathead in the White House whenever opportunity arises. Of Remnick, Updike writes: he is “as much a gentleman as Shawn…Of all the editors he is the best writer himself…” For his part, writing in December 2008 to a terminally ill Updike, Remnick says: “If there is anything in this world I can do for you, I will. Anything…You have not always been a part of this thing of ours, you are the thing itself - everything we stand for, everything we hope for, everything we hope to be. Every writer, artist, and editor feels that way.”

Writing letters, alas, is a dying art, murdered by email in all its haste, ephemerality and crudity. Perhaps there will in future be collections of writers’ emails, but I rather doubt it. That Updike knew his correspondence would one day be collected and reproduced is likely. Did that influence what he wrote?

There is no evidence of that. He wrote letters as he did other things, to say what he felt and meant, and to give pleasure. Even when responding to people whom he did not like or who had been mean about him and his work, he came out swinging, sweetly. I suspect any living recipients of such missiles are still wincing.

I had just two encounters with Updike. The first was during one of the earliest Edinburgh International Book Festivals, then held in Charlotte Square Gardens. I have a memory of him sneaking in at the back of a marquee while Anthony Burgess held forth. Later, I took a photograph of a pensive Updike (shirt, tie, suit) in the midst of a signing session. He looks as if he’d rather be on a golf course.

Then, in 1992, I travelled to Boston where I had arranged a rendezvous at the St Botolph Club on Commonwealth Avenue. It was February and snowing heavily. Not long after I arrived Updike called to ask if I would come to him rather than he to me. He had one condition; I was not to say I had visited him at home, let alone describe its contents, lest his wife (who was away) discover that a journalist had been prowling around.

When the train pulled into Beverly Springs Updike was alone on the platform, dressed as he is on the cover of Odd Jobs (beanie hat, well-worn winter jacket), as if he’d just taken a break from clearing leaves. Snow was general and the few horses in the fields steamed chillily. Soon we pulled up outside the white mansion that reminded Joyce Carol Oates not of Jay Gatsby’s house but of Tom and Daisy’s, at which Gatsby stared, “much like the lepers of old on Misery Island”. Updike served herbal tea and we talked for a couple of hours about his latest novel - Memories of the Ford Administration - and his writing life and writer friends such as John Cheever. When I said I thought I might spend the night in nearby Salem (setting of his The Witches of Eastwick) he offered to drive me there, recommended a characterful B&B and directed me to a diner called In a Pig’s Eye, where I spent a memorable few hours. In my copy of Memories of the Ford Administration, he wrote, “for Alan, who knows me better than myself.” Believe that if you will.

As far as I have been able to ascertain there is no such poetic form as a corona. According to McEwen, it consists of fifteen sonnets, the final one of which, the corona (“the poem’s crown”), takes the first line of each of the proceeding fourteen sonnets, puts them together in strict sequence and makes “perfect and simple sense”. Even a non-poet like myself can appreciate that this is devilishly difficult. Though only a few people have heard it recited and only two - the poet and his wife - have actually read it, ‘A Corona for Vivien’ is routinely described as a masterpiece on a par, say, with ‘The Waste Land’. The problem is that this is all hot air. Without having the poem to hand we cannot judge its quality though in describing it McEwen makes a good case for it.

Long poems are notoriously difficult to pull off. Yet from Dante onward, poets keep attempting them as if trying to scale Parnassus. For many Eliot’s ‘Waste Land’ is a pinnacle but there are numberless others deserving of mention. Among those that spring immediately to mind are Hugh MacDiarmid’s ‘A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle’, which has 2685 challenging (not least to anyone unfamiliar with the Scots tongue) stanzas, Basil Bunting’s autobiographical ‘Briggflatts’, and Louis MacNeice’s ‘Autumn Journal’, published in the spring of 1939 when those with eyes to see knew war was on the horizon. As it reaches its sombre crescendo, MacNeice writes:

The New Year comes with bombs, it is too late

To dose the dead with honourable intentions:

If you have honour to spare, employ it on the living;

The dead are as dead as 1938.

Re-reading ‘Autumn Journal’ recently, my thoughts turned to another long poem, Bob Dylan’s ‘Desolation Row’. I know, I know, it’s not a poem in the strictest sense of the word because it was written as a song. But this is to split hairs: is ‘Ae Fond Kiss’ a poem or a song? Who cares - it is what it is, an ageless poem and a seducative song.

I first heard ‘Desolation Row’ not long after it was released in 1967 on Highway 61 Revisited. What an album that is. What an assault on the senses, and what a challenge it was to my teenage brain. On it, Dylan played guitar, harmonica, piano and “police car”. He also wrote the weirdest of sleeve notes that some sixty years on still do my head in. By the time we reached ‘Desolation Row’ we had already been blitzed by eight epoch-defining tracks, including ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, ‘It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry’ and ‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues’. While many Dylanologists cannot see past ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, top of my chart is ‘Desolation Row’. Many were the hours I spent in a friend’s room replaying its eleven minutes and eighteen seconds trying to figure out what it all signified. We were not alone. Philip Larkin, who much preferred 1920s jazz to 1960s rock, wrote that it has “an enchanting tune and mysterious, possibly half-baked words”.

The song/poem was written in 1965 when America was mired in war in Vietnam. ‘Desolation Row’ is where the counter culture is based, a place from which the writer can look down with wonder and horror and sardonic amusement. Dylan throws everything into the mix, like a bartender experimenting with yet to be named cocktails. You can hear the mockery in his voice as he measures out disdain as Eliot’s Prufrock measured out his life with coffee spoons. In common too with Eliot, Dylan bombards us with references: Bette Davis, Cinderella, Cain and Abel, Ophelia and Einstein, Casanova and Robin Hood are all invoked. And then he comes to the poets:

Praise be to Nero’s Neptune

The Titanic sails at dawn

And everybody’s shouting

“Which Side Are You On?

And Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot

Fighting in the captain’s tower

While calypso singers laugh at them

And fishermen hold flowers

Between the windows of the sea

Where lovely mermaids flow

And nobody has to think too much

About Desolation Row

Theses could be written about that stanza alone. Listening again, I was struck by its humour, something that’s often there in Dylan’s lyrics but which is too rarely acknowledged. The image of modernist heavyweights Pound and Eliot slugging it out for the captaincy of a ship even as it sinks reminds me of Borges’s blind men fighting over a comb. Not only is America at war with Vietnam, it is in conflict with itself, young against old, rich against poor, cultured against philistine, artists against politicians. Dylan is an observer, not the fabled voice of a generation from which he did his best to distance himself. He is on no-one’s side but his own. Famously, in an interview with Playboy, when asked what he would do if he was president, he replied semi-seriously: “I would immediately rewrite ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, and little children, instead of memorizing ‘America the Beautiful’, would have to memorize ‘Desolation Row’.”

That was in 1966, a year before Highway 61 Revisited was released. By then, though, ‘Desolation Row’ had become part of Dylan’s concert repertoire and was perceived by many of his fans to be an alternative State of the Union address. I suppose you could make a case for that but I don’t buy it. Like ’The Waste Land’, ’Desolation Row’ carries nothing so crude as a message. Might the same be said of ‘A Corona for Vivien’? You may find the answer to that in the last line of What We Can Know.

Like all good ideas, it has spawned many imitators, and there are few corners of the globe that do not have one. It used to be said that a town without a public library did not deserve to be called civilised. You might say the same about book festivals. Even today, when money is tight and philistinism is rife, there are book festivals from the tip to the toe of Scotland. Wearing a variety of hats - board member, sponsor, critic, chairperson, author - I have been to every one of Edinburgh’s book festivals and have watched it grow into the leviathan it is today, with 600 plus events and even more writers. Whatever else it is, it is a remarkable organisational feat.

Thinking back to those early days, what images return. One year I was standing at the back of the marquee listening to Anthony Burgess in full flow when the canvas flaps parted and in sneaked John Updike. Then, when the coffers were overflowing, those of us involved with programming the mid-morning Meet the Author slot wined and dined authors as they came and went. As the Festival’s reputation grew, authors flocked to Charlotte Square. I remember taking PD James on a tour of local churches, including St Giles, where she may have found the plot for one of her thrillers as she pondered the tattered flag rescued from the debacle of Flodden. With Garrison Keillor, I toured music shops on a quest to find albums - he was fan of Jean Redpath and Aly Bain - unobtainable in the US. One evening I introduced Dervla Murphy, the intrepid Irish travel writer, to the Oxford Bar, where she downed half a dozen pints of cider to no noticeable effect.

In flood the memories: a diva-esque Maya Angelou, who swore by Johnny Walker Black Label; James Baldwin, who agreed to come thanks to his friendship with James Campbell and who the morning he was due to appear had the mother of all hangovers; John Irving, who read mesmerisingly from A Prayer For Owen Meany.

In 1987, while serving on the board of the Book Festival, I suggested we invite Hunter S. Thompson, notorious for his ‘Gonzo’ style of journalism, and for his ambivalent relationship with the Hell’s Angels. Perhaps not appreciating what might transpire, my fellow board members agreed. With my old amigo Ralph Steadman - who had illustrated Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - acting as go-between, an invitation was sent and (to my astonishment) accepted. When tickets went on sale they were snapped up within hours and as the day of reckoning grew nearer, parking spaces around Charlotte Square were jammed with Harley Davidsons. Whether their owners were bona fide Hell’s Angels or merely men of a certain age in the midst of a mid-life crisis I cannot possibly say. In the end, as the world’s press reported, Thompson did not make it across the Atlantic. Anyone interested in why he was thwarted can read the full story in his account ‘The Last Taxi to Scotland’, which is reprinted in my book Edinburgh: The Autobiography.

In September 2003, while on a trip to Prague with Muriel Spark, I suggested that the time had come for her to return to the city of her birth. She was then 85 and there would be few more such opportunities. To my surprise, she agreed and her appearance the following year has become the stuff of legend. She died in 2006, having made her peace with the place where she once said she could never hope to be understood.

Which brings me to the present. Things have been difficult of late for the EIBF which, in 2020, survived a fallow year because of COVID. Similarly, the move forced upon it from Charlotte Square and the New Town to a new home at the Futures Institute on the Meadows was painful. This was followed by the loss of one of its major sponsors, Baillie Gifford, who withdrew after a slew of holier-than-thou writers unfairly vilified it.

Even at the best of times reading the commentariat is deeply dispiriting, but when it trains its sights on the Book Festival it reaches hitherto unexplored depths of ignorance. Recently, a columnist suggested that when the EIBF lost Baillie Gifford it should simply rustle up a replacement. This same scribe thinks every sponsor should be deemed dodgy until proven otherwise. How clean, one wonders, is his employer? Or he himself? How many flights has he taken of late? With whom are his savings/pension invested? Does he have a gas-guzzling car?

Then there are those - too numerous to mention - whose gout flares at the mere mention of Nicola Sturgeon. One bilious columnist rabbited on for a thousand words about the inadequacies of the former FM’s forthcoming memoir, Frankly, without, needless to say, having read a word of it. Here one might add that Sturgeon’s forthcoming event in the biggest venue at the Book Festival was one of the first to sell out, so she clearly still has many admirers. The gender wars is another stick with which to beat the Book Festival, simply because gender critical authors have not been invited to participate. Who knows why. Have those who have bemoaned their absence bothered to ask?

And so it goes. What none of these reactionary and ill-formed pundits do is make any effort to understand what it takes to run an organisation as complex and costly as the Book Festival. Indeed, I doubt whether many of those so-called opinion formers have ever attended it, either as participants or audience members. Thinking back to 1983, I am unable to identify another phenomenon with its origins in this cantankerous corner of the planet that has had such far-reaching influence. What I do know is that while it has taken decades to make it a success, it can all too quickly be consigned to history.

WRITING WORTH READING - HURRY!

A gentle reminder that tickets are now on sale for the festival of Writing Worth Reading (Royal Scots Club, 29-31 Abercromby Place, Edinburgh), which runs from 11-23 August. There are twelve events featuring a stellar cast: Steven Veerapen (James I and VI), Helen Percy (from pulpit to sheep pen), Magnus Linklater (Eric Linklater), Devi Sridhar (how to live to 100), Andrew Heaton (in the time of Trump), James Robertson (his cultural life), Bill Coles (Lord ‘Lucky’ Lucan), Mark Douglas-Home (the sea detective), Joseph Farrell (the art of duelling), Bendor Grosvenor (great British art), Rosemary Goring (Mary, Queen of Scots) and Liz Lochhead (her cultural life). Hotfoot it to www.royalscotsclub.com/events for details.

A few days after the first blaze I went to see for myself how bad the damage was. “It was a morning remarkable for its dankness,” I wrote shortly thereafter in the Times Literary Supplement, “the hills to the west enveloped in mist, the pavements greasy with drizzle.” Few places look better in miserable weather; Glasgow is not one of them. On this particular day it felt forlorn. The area around the Mack was cordoned off and men in hard hats, steel-capped boots and fluorescent jackets hung around eating bacon rolls and slurping tea. Stonework was blackened by smoke and many windows had been melted by the furnace. A smattering of sightseers huddled together as at a funeral.

Over the next few days, I heard from many folk who had either studied at the Mack or taught there. My daughter was one of them. To her, like everyone else I spoke to, the loss of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s masterpiece was inconceivable and its revival imperative. Usually, when a renowned building is destroyed, there is an acrimonious debate over whether it should be rebuilt as it had been or whether an entirely new structure was a fitting response.

With the Mack, there was little doubt - a few knuckleheads notwithstanding - that it must be returned to its original glory. It was, after all, sui generis and so well documented and photographed that given a will and an infusion of cash it was relatively straightforward to bring it convincingly back to life.

The second fire, however, put paid to those plans. How it started we do not know. A report, published in 2022 by the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, identified three potential causes: an electrical fault; an accident (unspecified); arson. To make matters even worse, the alarm system had failed to sound, which meant that by the time firefighters arrived Mack II was burning ferociously. Be that as it may, if the fire was the work of an arsonist, may he - or she or they! - rot in a cell decorated by Münch.

Where things stand today is hard to assess. Comparisons - ludicrous, odious, telling - have been made with Notre Dame cathedral and the speed with which the French restored it just five years after its fire. No such urgency has been shown in regard to the Mack, which is curious. Some - much - of the blame must surely be laid at the door of Glasgow School of Art and its hapless management. Culpable, too, are Glasgow’s civic leaders and those full-time panjandrums who inhabit Holyrood and Westminster. Are they all so mired in moribundity that they cannot find the means to make the Mack great again? Or are they just philistines, who have no attachment to a building that by rare consensus is one of this undeserving nation’s finest? One wonders if any of them have ever seen round it, for if they had they would know that the present state of affairs is intolerable.

Back in the day, when my good friend Dugald Cameron was the School’s Director, it was a delight to be given a bespoke tour. As afternoon slipped into evening, Dugald did the rounds like a squire surveying his country estate. He was always eager to seek out students and comment on their work in progress. While some visitors, to whom the Mack was a place of pilgrimage, an aesthetic Lourdes, were appalled, Dugald revelled in the fact that it was a working building. To him, every chip in the hallowed woodwork was testimony to its effectiveness and relevance. Here was no museum. Reverence was alien to him; the Mack without artists was like Venice without canals. Every year, he rejoiced in a new intake of students inspired by their surroundings.

Dugald was associated with what he called “the most wonderful place on earth” for more than forty years, the last nine of which he spent as Director. His office - “the Headmaster’s Room” - had a table, chairs and custom-built shower all designed by Mackintosh. Unaccustomed to indulging fools, Dugald was not a fan of conceptualism. For him, drawing (a skill neglected in art schools at present) was - is - the fulcrum of all art. No mean draughtsman himself, his paintings of planes and trains are much coveted. Were it not for his dodgy eyes, he once told me, he would like to have been an RAF pilot. Show him a drawing of a Rolls Royce engine and he’d purr over it as others might a Leonardo Codex.

Unsurprisingly, for Dugald the library was the apotheosis of Mackintosh’s genius. After all, it was in it that he met his late wife Nancy. Situated on the first floor, it must have been directly in the line of the flames. Constrained by budget, Mackintosh made timber his principal material, which left the library vulnerable to combustion. I don’t believe I have ever seen a room more conducive to study. The bookcases, the windows, the light fittings, tables, desks, beams and pillars all combined to create the kind of harmony of which architects dream but rarely achieve. To anyone who doubts Mackintosh’s talent, I recommend they spend an hour or so browsing through Roger Billcliffe’s Charles Rennie Mackintosh: The Complete Furniture, Furniture Drawings & Interior Designs (2009, 4th revised edition).

This story ought to have a happy ending, but it does not. Nor can we be confident it ever will. If you read the Herald, where its columnists and correspondents howl daily about the state of the erstwhile Second City of Empire’s built heritage, you can’t help but feel that decline is irrevocable and inevitable. Rage, rage as the scribes might, nothing has any effect. Everywhere, it would appear, there are fine buildings being left to nature until such a time that the only recourse is demolition. If this is to be the Mack’s fate what does it say about us?

WRITING WORTH READING - TICKETS STILL AVAILABLE

A gentle reminder that tickets are now on sale for the festival of Writing Worth Reading (Royal Scots Club, 29-31 Abercromby Place, Edinburgh), which runs from 11-23 August. There are twelve events featuring a stellar cast: Steven Veerapen (James I and VI), Helen Percy (from pulpit to sheep pen), Magnus Linklater (Eric Linklater), Devi Sridhar (how to live to 100), Andrew Heaton (in the time of Trump), James Robertson (his cultural life), Bill Coles (Lord ‘Lucky’ Lucan), Mark Douglas-Home (the sea detective), Joseph Farrell (the art of duelling), Bendor Grosvenor (great British art), Rosemary Goring (Mary, Queen of Scots) and Liz Lochhead (her cultural life). Hotfoot it to www.royalscotsclub.com/events for details.

As their fans know, the Wainwrights are to dysfunction what the Von Trapps were to Edelweiss. Among their number are Kate McGarrigle, Loudon’s former wife, who is no longer with us, his son Rufus and his daughter Martha. Rarely does anyone in a Wainwright song - including, it goes without saying, their lynchpin - emerge with their dignity intact. For a brief history of their tortured relationships I recommend ‘Meet the Wainwrights’ which was recorded on a cruise ship on the high seas when “the Wainwright familee” were the supper-time entertainment.

Loudon Wainwright III is 78 and despite creating a body of work that is sui generis and a treat that keeps on giving he is not as well-appreciated as he deserves. In that, of course, he is not alone, a fact that it’s pointless to bemoan. He is perhaps best known for his 1973 song ‘Dead Skunk (in the middle of the road)’ which, as Greil Marcus writes, had whole families singing along to it on their vacations: “The more you heard ‘Dead Skunk’, the funnier it got, but out of the blood and guts on the back road where someone five minutes or five hours before you had hit the thing you could feel an undertow, a self-loathing, a wish to disappear and never come back, to lose even your own name.”

While I laughed along with everyone else, I was never overly enamoured of ‘Dead Skunk’. More to my taste are the thirty songs gathered on the double-CD album High Wide & Handsome, which was released in 2009. I thought I had bought it but after scouring the house, I remembered I’d borrowed it from the music department of Edinburgh City Libraries. Thanks to Jeff Bezos, I now have my own copy and have been playing it ceaselessly since it arrived a week or so ago.

High Wide & Handsome is sub-titled ‘The Charlie Poole Project’. It’s Wainwright’s homage to his long-deceased fellow artist. A number of the songs were written by Wainwright and his collaborator Dick Connette, while others were either part of Charlie Poole’s repertoire or evoke his spirit and illuminate his life, which was not long; he was born in 1892 in cotton-picking North Carolina and died in 1931 after a monumental drinking binge. Fittingly, a banjo is carved on his headstone.

Even before he reached his teens Charlie played a home-made banjo. After a spell working as a millworker, his feet grew itchy - an incurable condition - and he took to the road, busking, doing odd jobs and getting into trouble with the law, usually as a byproduct of his drinking. To all intents and purposes, he was illiterate - he could “barely read a stop sign”, recalls his great-nephew, Kinney Rorrer, in the sleeve notes to High Wide & Handsome - but he managed nevertheless to lead a successful band. Signed in the mid-1920s for Columbia Records, he quickly recorded two sessions, sales of which, notes Rorrer, reached nearly half a million copies.

“When I heard that Loudon Wainwright was going to address himself to what Charlie Poole left behind,” writes Greil Marcus, “I didn’t know who was luckier. Poole might have been waiting all these years for someone to talk back to him so completely in his own language. Wainwright might have been waiting since he first heard Charlie Poole to get up the nerve to do it.” For his part, Wainwright says he first became aware of Poole in the early 1970s when visiting a friend called Patrick Sky. “Pat picked up a guitar (maybe it was a banjo) and sang me a bit of ‘Awful Hungry Hash House’ and the line ‘The beefsteak it was rare and the butter had red hair’ immediately made me do two things, almost simultaneously: 1) laugh out loud, and 2) wonder ‘Who the hell wrote that?’”

As Wainwright is at pains to point out, Poole did not write these lyrics. Nor did he write any of the songs he performed and recorded. What he did do, however, was make them his own and record defining versions of them. What is also clear is that Wainwright found a soulmate in Poole, and while High Wide & Handsome is a fitting tribute to him it is in no way an attempt to mimic him. Take, for example, ‘I’m the Man Who Road the Mule Around the World’, a traditional American folk song, with which Poole had fun, as is apparent in the following verse:

Oh she’s my daisy, she’s black-eyed and she’s crazy -

The prettiest girl I thought I ever saw

Now her breath smells sweet, but I’d rather smell her feet,

For she’s my freckle-faced consumptive Sara Jane

If I had to find one word to sum up Poole’s oeuvre I’d probably go for ‘Americana’, which I take to mean the authentic sound of American music. It’s a cocktail of folk, bluegrass, country, gospel, you name it, that has its acoustic roots in hardscrabble rural parts where music was - probably still is - an escape from the grind of making ends meet. These are tunes to make feet tap, pack dance floors, cause mourners to weep, and to bid the booze an unlikely adieu. Almost all the songs on the CD are sung by Loudon Wainwright, his delivery as pure as a mountain spring.

I have many favourites but the one that I love à la Tynan is ‘Where the Whippoorwill is Whispering Goodnight’, a gorgeous lament for a lost mother. On YouTube you can compare and contrast versions by Messrs Poole and Wainwright.

WRITING WORTH READING

A gentle reminder that tickets are now on sale for the festival of Writing Worth Reading (Royal Scots Club, 29-31 Abercromby Place, Edinburgh), which runs from 11-23 August. There are twelve events featuring a stellar cast: Steven Veerapen (James I and VI), Helen Percy (from pulpit to sheep pen), Magnus Linklater (Eric Linklater), Devi Sridhar (how to live to 100), Andrew Heaton (in the time of Trump), James Robertson (his cultural life), Bill Coles (Lord ‘Lucky’ Lucan), Mark Douglas-Home (the sea detective), Joseph Farrell (the art of duelling), Bendor Grosvenor (great British art), Rosemary Goring (Mary, Queen of Scots) and Liz Lochhead (her cultural life). Hotfoot it to www.royalscotsclub.com/events for details. To paraphrase Mr T. K. Maxx, when they’re gone, they’re gone.

Staying Alive has five hundred poems by poets from across the globe, drawing on Astley’s peerless knowledge - as founder in 1978 of Bloodaxe Books - of the poetry scene. As he says in his introduction, it is a book about what poetry means and its ability to experience “different aspects of life”. It has a dozen sections which cover just about every facet of the way we live, from birth to death, through growing up, falling in and out of love, our relationship with other inhabitants of the planet, war and peace, the place of the earth in the universe and, finally, the art of poetry.

Understandably, given the painful cost of permissions, many of the poets chosen are from Bloodaxe stock. Many, though, are not. To help readers unfamiliar with poetic jargon, Astley offers a glossary of terms “commonly used in discussions of poetic technique”. There is also a helpful essay - ‘The Sound of Poetry’ - in which the editor argues stoutly that there is no need for poetry to rhyme for it to be poetry. What is essential, however, is that all poetry must have rhythm. The same, I would suggest, might be said of prose, but you don’t need to read much modern fiction to realise that that idea has gone the way of all flesh.

Be all that as it may, dictionary definitions of poetry are often unsatisfactory. Chambers (my go-to dictionary) says poetry is “the art of the poet; the essential quality of a poem; poetical composition of writings collectively” - none of which gets us very far. In Staying Alive, Astley offers by way of an hors d’oeuvre a page of ‘Poets on Poetry’, which includes the following exchange between James Boswell and Samuel Johnson:

Boswell: “Sir, what is poetry?”

Johnson: “Why Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is; but it is not easy to tell what it is.”

Turning Staying Alive’s pages, one is always alert to those moments when a bulb is switched on. Great poetry is not just memorable, it offers an alternative view of things, a way of seeing that may never have occurred to the reader. Too often, as Astley acknowledges, poems are dismissed as ‘difficult’, especially by those suffering from the attention span of a TikToker. They gallop through a poem and, not immediately getting its meaning, dismiss it as incomprehensible. What Astley recommends, and what I do too, is that you should first read a poem without bothering about its ‘meaning’. That can come later with revisiting and re-reading. Truly great poems, like truly great paintings, may never fully reveal themselves; they remain, like the Mona Lisa, enigmatic, open-ended, a perpetual source of fascination, dependent often on the state of mind (and age) of the reader.

So to some poems in Staying Alive, all chosen serendipitously. First, Tom Leonard’s ‘The Voyeur’:

what’s your favourite word dearie

is it wee

I hope it’s wee

wee’s such a nice wee word

like a wee hairy dog

with two wee eyes

such a nice wee word to play with dearie

you can say it quickly

with a wee smile

and a wee glance to the side

or you can say it slowly dearie

with your mouth a wee bit open

and a wee sigh dearie

a wee sigh

put your wee head on my shoulder dearie

oh my

a great wee word

and Scottish

it makes you proud

See what I mean about rhyme? Take one word out or substitute it with an alternative or add a punctuation mark and the whole does not hold.

Next, with a flip of the pages, ‘The Video’ by Fleur Adcock:

When Laura was born, Ceri watched.

They all gathered around Mum’s bed -

Dad and the midwife and Mum’s sister

and Ceri. ‘Move over a bit,’ Dad said -

he was trying to focus the camcorder

on Mum’s legs and the baby’s head.

After she had a little sister,

and Mum had gone back to being thin,

and was twice as busy, Ceri played

the video again and again.

She watched Laura come out, and then,

in reverse, she made her go back in again.

On first reading, I laughed. On a second, I began to wonder about the relationship between Ceri and Laura, and how Ceri’s relationship with her mum had been transformed by Laura’s arrival.

Here, probably because I’ve visited the page so often, is Derek Mahon’s masterpiece ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’, of which I will quote only the first of six stanzas, in the hope that it will encourage you to seek out the complete poem:

Even now there are places where a thought might grow -

Peruvian mines, worked out and abandoned

To a slow clock of condensation,

An echo trapped for ever, and a flutter

Of wild flowers in the lift-shaft,

Indian compounds where the wind dances

And a door bangs with diminished confidence,

Lime crevices behind rippling rain-barrels,

Dog corners for bone. Burials;

And in a disused shed in Co. Wexford.

Can’t you just hear that door banging with “diminished confidence”? Finally - for there is no stopping me otherwise - what better than a blast of Auden? This is his ‘Gare du Midi’, a short story condensed into eight evocative lines. The date is 1938, a year before the outbreak of you-know-what. Who is the man? Is it Auden or is it an anonymous other whom the poet has spied while killing time waiting for another “nondescript express”?

A nondescript express in from the South,

Crowds round the ticket barrier, a face

To welcome which the mayor has not contrived

Bugles or braid: something about the mouth

Distracts the stray look with alarm and pity.

Snow is falling. Clutching a little case,

He walks out briskly to infect a city

Whose terrible future may just have arrived.

Staying Alive has many such plums. Following its success, it was succeeded by three sequels - Being Alive (2004), Being Human (2011) and Staying Human (2020), each of which is saluted by Mia, Meryl and me.

Called Writing Worth Reading, it will run from 11-23 August at the Royal Scots Club, a stone’s throw from Charlotte Square, much-missed home of the original Edinburgh International Book Festival. There will be twelve events over twelve days, the aim being to “celebrate literature, history and culture”.

That’s as much of an agenda as those of us organising it have. There is no sponsorship either private or public. Participants have been invited from near (India Street) and far (the USA). ‘Eclectic’ perhaps best describes the programme, which includes talks and conversations on Eric Linklater (with his son Magnus), Lord Lucan, how to live longer (you’ve eaten your last deep-fried Mars bar), Mary, Queen of Scots, James VI and I, what’s going on in the mind of Donald Trump, the fad for duelling (nothing to do with the A9), the best of British art, shepherding and how an oceanographer solves crimes.

Two special events feature novelist James Robertson and poet Liz Lochhead, who will reveal the artists, writers and musicians who have influenced and inspired them. The full programme is given below. Tickets for all events are £12.50 (including tea and coffee) and available via royalscotsclub.com and arkle-theatre.com.

Monday, 11 August, 10:30am - 11:30am

The Real James VI and I

‘Mixed’ perhaps best describes history’s assessment of James VI & I, the first monarch to rule over Scotland, England and Ireland. But, as Steven Veerapen argues in The Wisest Fool, his groundbreaking biography, there was much more to James than a smelly, witch-hunting, drooling nincompoop whose speech could barely be understood.

Tuesday, 12 August, 10:30am - 11:30am

From Pulpit to Sheep-pen

In Skirly Crag: The Shepherd, Her Dogs, The Hill and The Hare, Helen Douglas, a former Kirk minister, describes her new life as a freelance shepherd. Forget beribboned Bo-Peep dresses; think rather of vintage waterproofs, shirts worn to shreds and jeans smeared with goodness knows what.

Wednesday 13 August, 10:30am - 11:30am

Saved By His Tin Hat

Eric Linklater was a man of many parts - novelist, playwright, historian, soldier, angler, Scottish Nationalist, broadcaster and, last but not least, family man. His son Magnus Linklater, erstwhile editor of the Scotsman and now a columnist with the Times, recalls the man who once described himself as ‘an old peasant with a pen’.

Thursday 14 August, 10:30am - 11:30am

A Matter of Life and Death

During the Covid crisis Professor Devi Sridhar was a welcome voice of reason who had the ear of top politicians - even Piers Morgan praised her. In her new book, How Not to Die (Too Soon), she asks what we can do - as individuals and as a society - to extend our lifespans.

Friday 15 August, 10:30am - 11:30am

In the Time of Trump

Podcaster, broadcaster, author (Laughter is Better Than Communism) and stand-up comedian (Star Trek’s William Shatner said he’s ‘very funny’), Andrew Heaton arrives from the Other Side of the Pond with news of how things are going so far during The Donald’s second term. Fasten your seat belts.

Saturday 16 August, 10:30am - 11:30am

This Cultural Life

Multi award-winning novelist, poet and Scots language advocate, James Robertson is one the nation’s most revered writers. But who are the authors, painters, musicians and other artists who have influenced him and whom does he most admire? All will be revealed in the course of a gem-filled hour.

Monday 18 August, 10:30am - 11:30am

Murder Most Foul

In a former existence William ‘Bill’ Coles was a tabloid journalist and the ‘go-to guy’ on all things concerning Lord ‘Lucky’ Lucan, who murdered his children’s nanny when he meant to kill his wife. Lord Lucan: My Story, a fictional memoir, supposedly written by the odious Earl, tells the true story of one of the most sensational crimes of the last century.

Tuesday 19 August, 10:30am - 11:30am

Making Waves

With The Sea Detective, which first appeared in 2011, and its sparkling sequels, Mark Douglas-Home gave the crime genre a much-needed injection of originality. The eponymous detective - an oceanographer - can predict where objects came from when they wash ashore, and where they are headed when lost at sea. Page-turning stuff.

Wednesday 20 August, 10:30am - 11:30am

A Question of Honour

Once upon a time, as Joseph Farrell describes in Honour and the Sword, duelling was a cultural phenomenon, practised mainly - but not entirely - by men. But where did it originate and why was it once so commonplace? All weapons will be confiscated.

Thursday 21 August, 10:30am - 11:30am

When I Paint My Masterpiece

Art historian Bendor Grosvenor is perhaps best known for finding and researching previously lost Old Masters. He has presented numerous BBC programmes, including Fake or Fortune? and The Culture Show. His book, The Invention of British Art, brilliantly describes a journey of discovery through an incredible array of British art works and artists.

Friday 22 August, 10:30am - 11:30am

Oh Mary!

In Homecoming, Rosemary Goring recalled Mary, Queen of Scot’s years in Scotland. With her revelatory new book, Exile, we learn of the ill-fated monarch’s life in captivity in England. Think treachery, deceit, hope, intrigue, coded letters, spies, murder and the tragic end of one of history’s most beguiling and controversial figures.

Saturday 23 August, 10:30am - 11:30am

This Cultural Life

Hard as it is to believe, more than half a century has passed since Liz Lochhead published her first collection of poetry. Now a national treasure and serial award-winner, she is a former Makar and recipient of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Here she reveals the artists, writers and musicians who have influenced and inspired her.

In Muriel’s case, chief among the lie-spreaders was her former lover and literary collaborator, Derek Stanford. Cashing in on her fame following the success in 1961 of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, he wrote Muriel Spark: A Biographical and Critical Study (1963) and Inside the Forties: Literary Memoirs 1937-1957 (1977), in which there are more falsehoods than midgies in summer in Skye.

As anyone who has tried to disprove a lie knows, attempting to set the record straight is enervating, frustrating and time-consuming. Muriel did what she could in Curriculum Vitae and hoped to do more with the appointment of Martin Stannard as her biographer. Theirs, alas, was not a happy relationship and the resultant book, Muriel Spark: The Biography (2009), added considerably to the pain its subject - then in her twilight years - was already suffering physically. Apart from anything else, as anyone who has an ear to hear can tell, Stannard’s prose is to literature what the Eurovision Song Contest is to music.

Frances Wilson is the latest ‘scholar’ to embrace Muriel. The “seeds” of her newly published book, Electric Spark, she says in its preface, “were planted” on the publication of Stannard’s. “The biography she [Muriel] had in mind,” writes Wilson, in her trademark hyperbolic, fling-into-the-blender-and-hope-for-the-best style, “was an historical document, as plain as a news report, and because she had thrown away ‘nothing on paper’ for nearly fifty years, there was little further research for Stannard to do: her Cinderella story was organised into box files equivalent in height to an airport control tower, in length to an Olympic-sized swimming pool and in width to the wingspan of a Boeing 777.”

I had high hopes for Electric Spark and readily agreed to review it for the Literary Review. I also agreed to introduce Frances Wilson (at least one of whose previous books, an eccentric biography of DH Lawrence, I rated) at an event in an Edinburgh bookshop. The first hint that all might not be to my liking came with the title and sub-title: Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark. In my mind’s eye, I could see Muriel, the mistress of concision, blue pencil in hand, putting a dash through the double use of ‘Spark’. The word ‘enigma’ was likewise perplexing. “The word most commonly used to describe Muriel Spark,” runs Electric Spark’s blurb, “is ‘puzzling’. Spark was a puzzle, and so too are her books.” Is it, was she, were they? I scratched my head and dived in.

Soon, however, I was in search of my own blue pencil, which I used to underline innumerable factual errors (several on one page alone), harebrained conclusions, imaginative assumptions, unignorable repetitions, sentences that run like a tap with no stop, unsubstantiated speculation and recycled anecdotes that date back to the bad old days of Stanford and Stannard. Such was my dismay, I told the Literary Review that I could not in good faith review Electric Spark without seeing a finished copy. This was relayed to its publisher, Bloomsbury, who in turn asked if I would be willing to share my misgivings with it them and their author.

As seasoned reviewers will appreciate, this is not a common occurrence. But high on co-operative spirit, I agreed, and over a weekend compiled a long - but not comprehensive - list of queries. I know now, having studied a published copy of Electric Spark, that some of my concerns were addressed. But not all by any means were. Here’s one example that affects me personally. Wilson - taking her lead from Stannard - quotes me saying that in my book, Appointment in Arezzo, I wrote that Muriel was “immaculate: morally, sartorially, and in her work; continuously charming and generous, blameless, motherly, untouchable”. This irked not only because I did not say it or anything like it but because it is so maladroitly written.

I relayed this to Bloomsbury who, by way of reparation, kept the erroneous quote but acknowledged in a buried footnote that the words “‘blameless, motherly, untouchable’ were not used by Alan Taylor”. There was no mention, though, of the other words I did not use. Meanwhile - stick with it! - a lazy and ill-informed reviewer for the Observer, Rachel Cooke, an English journalist, repeated all of Stannard’s words in a review of Electric Spark and ascribed them to me. At least the Observer has had the grace to amend the review online and issue a retraction in the print edition of the paper.

Thus lies hop like fleas from one source to another, misleading the reading public, piling error upon error, and - deliberate repetition! - “sucking the blood of the intellect”. This is not the place forensically to examine the countless failings of Electric Spark but a few cannot be allowed to go unchallenged. For example, Wilson writes that when, in what was then Rhodesia Muriel’s marriage to her violent husband splintered, Muriel sent their son Robin to a Catholic convent school. This school, which Wilson has not identified, is described as a “torture chamber”. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t; no one knows. Perhaps someone with more knowledge can enlighten us. What we do know is that Muriel managed to send Robin to what she believed was a good school despite the fact that custody of him had been given to her estranged and mentally ill husband.

There are many similar instances of wild speculation in Electric Spark, all of which have gone unremarked by reviewers such as Ms Cooke. For these unquestioning, back-slapping ‘critics’, the mot de jour is “brilliant”. Katherine Rundell is quoted on the book’s cover: “Frances Wilson writes books that blow your hair back.” I think this is meant as a compliment.

Meanwhile, no reviewer I’ve seen has bothered to interrogate Wilson’s claim that, in Curriculum Vitae, Muriel invented a girl she knew at school in Edinburgh called Nita McEwen because, bizarrely, she “hated” writing her memoir. According to Muriel, Nita looked very like her to the extent that they might have been mistaken for twins. Later, in Rhodesia, Muriel and Nita were to meet again. There Nita was murdered by her husband in the same hotel in which Muriel was staying. But was there a real Nita? Wilson suggests there was not but declines to give chapter and verse as to how she has gone about trying to prove a negative.

She does, though, tell us that if you rearrange the letters in Nita McEwen you may come up with Twin Menace. “Twins were menacing, whatever form they took in Spark’s experience as a writer,” explains Wilson, adding in her inimitable, brain-numbing manner: “She had twinned herself with Stanford, who then traded on her name; and she found twins in her four Marys: the poet and code maker Mary Stuart, spouse of a violent husband, mother of an only son, victim of numerous plots; the litigious and terrifying Marie Stopes, divorcee, compiler of a colossal archive and mother of an only son, who, under the nom de plume of Mary Carmichael, was the ‘unknown girl’ of A Room of One’s Own; the unrecognised genius Mary Shelley, wife of a madman, subject of blackmail, mother of an only son, living by her pen and betrayed by her friends; and Mary Stranger, another girl who loved to be unknown.” Make of all that what you will!

First published in 1934, Appointment in Samarra offers an alternative take on what Scott Fitzgerald popularised as the Jazz Age. O’Hara’s world, however, unlike Fitzgerald’s, is not that of the fabulously rich but of the moderately well off. Its inhabitants, fully paid up subscribers to the American dream, are professional types, members of country clubs and acutely aware of their privileged status. They are effortlessly racist, endemically anti-semitic, inherently sexist, and stick rigidly to their self-imposed rules and deal brutally with anyone, such as Julian, who transgresses. To them, indeed to him, ostracisation is more painful than castration.

Julian English, like John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom, is a car dealer. Cadillacs are Julian’s brand and selling them has provided him with a good living and a comely wife, Caroline. The novel is set in 1931 in a smallish town called Gibbsville where there is the Lantenengo Country Club. We are first introduced to it on Christmas Eve when there is a party in full swing. “Everyone was drinking,” O’Hara writes, “or had just finished a drink, or was just about to take one.” Julian is among the throng and listening contemptuously, impatiently, to interminable, ‘humorous’ stories told by Harry Reilly, his nemesis, at whom he will throw an ice-packed highball. The problem for Julian is that Reilly owns the company of which Julian is president.

This, then, is what precipitates Julian’s descent. Over the course of the following three days, we track him as he drives intoxicatedly from one nightmarish scene to another, abusing his wife, slugging another country club member, bemoaning his lot on the forecourt. “I was never meant to be a Cadillac dealer or any other kind of dealer,” he tells a priest at confession. But what he was meant to be is never clear. En route to the inevitable eponymous appointment place, O’Hara throws the kitchen sink into a plot which, while often discursive, is always compelling. We know things are going to end badly for Julian but there is always hope of redemption, is there not? Not if you’re John O’Hara, whose take on humankind has a tendency to veer towards the apocalyptic.

Like so many of the best novels, Appointment in Samarra offended the prurient who go through life look for things to give them the heebie-jeebies. In O’Hara’s case, this was invariably to do with sex. “The repeated offence O’Hara gave to Mrs Grundy lay mostly,” wrote John Updike, no stranger to offence-giving himself, “in his insistence on crediting his female characters with sexual appetites - with sturdy and even sweaty bodily and psychological existences independent of male desires.” Both Fitzgerald and Hemingway, however, loved the novel. “If you want to read a book by a man who knows exactly what he’s writing about and has written it marvellously well,” said Hemingway, “read Appointment in Samarra by John O’Hara.” Dorothy Parker was likewise smitten, as was the always trustworthy Fran Leibowitz, who dubbed O’Hara “the real Fitzgerald”.

What O’Hara, a man for whom a compliment often hid a criticism, would have thought of that is anyone’s guess. In his book Here at The New Yorker, Brendan Gill relates how, when someone said they’d been to see the play based on his novel Pal Joey for a second time and loved it even better than the first time, O’Hara riposted: “What was the matter with it the first time?” Chips grew on his shoulders like mushrooms in the dark. No profile of him neglects to mention how thin-skinned he was. He nursed grievances and collected slights like schoolboys used to stamps. “Oh, but John O’Hara was a difficult man!” is the opening sentence of Gill’s profile of him.

Born in 1905, in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, the model for his fictional Gibbsville, he was the first of seven children to a doctor father and housewife mother. The family were well-to-do Catholics and belonged to the best clubs. O’Hara rejected his father’s offer of $10,000 if he would agree to become a doctor. From an early age he was a heavy drinker and ardent womaniser despite being - in Gill’s estimation - startlingly ugly. He had many jobs, including some in journalism, none of which lasted very long.

By the late 1920s he had made his way to New York and by 1928 had his first piece accepted by The New Yorker. Though it was a relationship that lasted forty years and was what might diplomatically best be described as ‘fractious’, O’Hara published more than four hundred pieces, short stories mostly, in the magazine, a record that is unlikely ever to be topped. The short story was his forte and he excelled at it. “O’Hara,” remarked Gill, “was the best of us and he knew it, and this made him impatient for fame and academic recognition.” When this did not come, it served merely to fuel his sense of grievance. “The world both high and low,” added Gill, “fascinated and revolted him. He assumed that there never had been a time when it wouldn’t have fascinated and revolted him. He trusted his eye and ear to the extent that they were free of admiration and pity. Mankind was vile and without surprises for him. He wrote of its vileness with equanimity, page after page.”

Flaubert famously wrote: “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” The same - with a reservation or two - might be said of John O’Hara and Julian English. Their ends, though, were different. O’Hara died at his desk in 1970, aged 65, a wealthy if not a happy man. He was buried in the Princeton Cemetery. The inscription on his headstone, composed by O’Hara himself, reads: “BETTER / THAN ANYONE ELSE / HE TOLD THE TRUTH / ABOUT HIS TIME / HE WAS / A PROFESSIONAL / HE WROTE / HONESTLY AND WELL.”

Gatsby was Fitzgerald’s third novel, following This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and the Damned (1922). He started work on it in 1922 and named an early version Trimalchio, in homage to Petronius’s party animal in the Satyricon. Unsurprisingly, it was not a title his publisher thought would encourage book buyers to hand over their bucks. Nor, indeed, were others mooted by Fitzgerald. Take your pick from Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires, Trimalchio in West Egg, On the Road to West Egg, Gold-hatted Gatsby, Under the Red, White and Blue and - the prize turkey - The High-bouncing Lover.

Even when Fitzgerald alighted on The Great Gatsby, he was still vacillating. “I feel Trimalchio might have been the best after all,” he told Perkins. By then, however, it was too late; the novel had already been sold in advance to the trade as The Great Gatsby, so there was no going back. The literary gods had prevailed.

In hindsight, the title seems perfect. The ‘Great’ is patently ironic. Gatsby is many things but great is not one of them. I’ve always thought that Fitzgerald may have thought of him as a kind of crooked illusionist or magician, who in the heyday of music-halls invariably called themselves ‘Great’, as they pulled rabbits from hats and sawed their scantily-clad assistants in half. The model for Gatsby was most likely one Max von Gerlach, with whom Fitzgerald was acquainted as a frequenter of speakeasies. Like his fictional counterpart, von Gerlach was a bootlegger connected to Jewish mobsters. I think we can safely assume he was not a good person.

Fitzgerald is, of course, umbilically associated with the 1920s, when America truly came into its greatness. With the end of the war that was to end all wars, it was an era of change, optimism, enterprise, joie de vivre, possibility. And, in the same way as Bob Dylan was the reluctant frontman for the 1960s, Fitzgerald, born in 1896, was the embodiment of his generation. It was Malcolm Bradbury who pointed out that Fitzgerald lived the Twenties as if he owned them, which to an extent he did in his novels and many short stories. High on hope, and other toxicities, he popularised the phrase “the Jazz Age” and married a woman, Zelda, the flapper’s flapper, who so beguiled him that she appears in innumerable guises throughout his oeuvre.

From the outset, Fitzgerald was convinced that Gatsby was special. “I think my novel is the best American novel ever written,” he wrote to Perkins from France in August 1924. Perkins, to his relief, agreed, albeit with reservations. “The novel is a wonder,” he responded, and “an extraordinary book”. The suggestions he made - including bringing Gatsby into clearer focus, and moving up the telling of Gatsby’s past - were enthusiastically accepted by Fitzgerald. Even as the manuscript was sent to the printer, he was busy redrafting and revising. On its reissue nearly a decade later, he wrote: “What I cut out of it both physically and emotionally would make another novel.”

Like so many books that have become classics, The Great Gatsby received an ambivalent reception. Some critics couldn’t see past the meretriciousness of its principle characters and the glittering surface of its story. Fellow writers, however, were enthused, chief among them - from Fitzgerald’s point of view - T.S. Eliot, who noted: “In fact it seems to me to be the first step American fiction has taken since Henry James.” Rereading it recently, I was struck by the assuredness of the narrative voice and the melodic consistency of tone from its overture - “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.” - to its soaring conclusion: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Fitzgerald knew of what he wrote. He was part of the social milieu that he depicted and the people who inhabited it. The rich are different from the rest of us, as he observed, and not just because - as Hemingway quipped - they have more money. Gatsby, like so many of the rich, then and now, has acquired his phenomenal wealth by hook or by crook, and can buy anything and anyone, except the thing which he most craves: love. Meanwhile, Tom and Daisy, who come from old money, are no less vacuous. “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy,” we are told by the narrator, Nick Carraway, “they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

But, as Fitzgerald knew from personal experience, when a party ends, as all parties must, there follows the morning after and the prospect of a humdinger of a hangover. The joy of the Jazz Age ended with the financial crash of 1929 and the Great Depression, when rich and poor suffered in their different ways. Money was always a problem for Fitzgerald, who expended too much effort writing short stories for magazines, which paid handsomely, when he ought to have been at work on novels.

Without wishing to give too much away even to the few readers who have not read the novel, Gatsby ends tragically. The same can be said of the life of its creator, who died of a heart attack in 1940, aged 44, still struggling to make ends meet, and with an unfinished novel - The Last Tycoon - in embryo. “Scott should have been killed in a Bugatti in the south of France,” said his friend, John O’Hara, “and not to have died of neglect in Hollywood, a prematurely old little man haunting bookstores (as he was the last-but-one-time I saw him).” The last royalty statement he received from Scribner’s reported sales of seven copies of the greatest American novel of the twentieth century.

I wrote columns on and off for several decades and was constantly aware that longevity was not part of the deal. When anyone was daft enough to suggest I should consider republishing some of them I always resisted. Who’d want to read them? More to the point, why would I want to reread them? They were the past, history, a moment white - as Burns said of snow falling in the river - then melts for ever. Let them crumble to dust with the newspapers and magazines in which they appeared.

Having said that, I always rescue collections of columns from the indignity of charity shops. These now number several hundred, from cookery columns by MFK Fisher and Elizabeth David, sports columns by Hugh McIlvanney and Roger Angell, political columns by Christopher Hitchens and George Orwell, and humorous columns by Miles Kington, Michael Frayn and Jeffrey Barnard, who was infamous for the non-appearance of his Low Life column in the Spectator (“Jeffrey Barnard is unwell”).

My favourite columnist is Flann O’Brien, one of several pseudonyms used by Brian O’Nolan (1911-66) who, from 1939 to his death, contributed a daily satirical column to the Irish Times. This was an incredible achievement, not least because for much of that time he held down a job in the civil service and was drinking as if every day was Hogmanay. If there was a point to O’Brien’s columns it was to amuse, usually at the expense of pompous panjandrums. A perfect example of this was his inspired “Book Handling” service, which for a fee offered to rough up books owned by philistines to make them look well-thumbed.

The importance of columnists to the places where they appear cannot be underestimated. Readers relate to them in a way that they do not to other journalists, following their travails and trains of thought. Meanwhile, the writers set a tone which helps define that of their parent publication. The best columnists have healthy egos, fertile imaginations, quick wits, rich hinterlands and an ability to write well at a lick. As anyone who has inhabited a column knows, deadlines approach as fast as tax demands and occupy more head space than a PhD. I have known columnists who, once given the green light by their editor, were afflicted by writer’s block. In such circumstances, some succumb to alcohol. Another solution was to follow Beryl Bainbridge’s advice given to aspiring novelists when struggling to make progress: open a book - any book - and ‘borrow’ the first sentence that takes your fancy. Which is fine as far as it goes, as long as you remember to delete it before the finished piece goes to print.

Until relatively recently, columnising was a male-dominated domain. Of the several hundred contributors to The Penguin Book of Columnists (1997), very few are women, even allowing for the rampant chauvinism of another age. The same book has few Scots, surprising given their disproportionate influence in Grub Street’s golden era. One such was well-read Ian Mackay (1898-1952), from Wick. Starting at the John O’Groat’s Journal, he progressed to the News Chronicle, for which over a seven-year span he wrote over a million words. “His subjects,” notes Christopher Silvester, editor of The Penguin Book of Columnists, “were serendipitous and quirky and infused with his learning and his love of Greek mythology, Socrates, Shakespeare, Dr Johnson, Dickens, Sherlock Holmes, George Bernard Shaw and music-hall songs.”

Another Scot featured by Silvester is James Cameron (1911-85), whom many would choose as one of the best - if not the best - British journalists of his era. I don’t doubt his credentials - he wrote eye-witness accounts of the atom bomb tests at Bikini Atoll, the Chinese invasion of Tibet and the Korean War, as well as portraits of Mao Tse-Tung, Churchill, Stalin and his power-obsessed boss Lord Beaverbrook - but was Cameron a great columnist? Maybe not, but if you are at all interested in what makes a first-rank journalist seek out his memoir, Point of Departure (1967).

So who - I hear you scream - is the best ever Scottish columnist? Ignoring the claims of John Junor, aka the “sage of Auchtermuchty” (catchphrase “pass me the sickbag”), Ian Jack, who was never happier than when writing about trains, boats and planes, and George Mackay Brown, too couthy for my taste, my nominee is James ‘Scotty’ Reston. Who he, do I hear you ask? Born in Clydebank in 1909 and educated in Dunbartonshire, he emigrated with his parents to the United States eleven years later. A controversial figure - not least because of his adoration of Henry Kissinger - Reston (d.1995), twice a Pulitzer Prize winner, broke stories like Donald Trump does promises. He declined the editorship of the Washington Post and wrote copiously for the New York Times. More about him can be read in Deadline: A Memoir (1991). For now, though, here’s a flavour of his columnising from the NYT, 15 February, 1963:

“President Kennedy is a puzzle. One day he pleads with the country to sacrifice, and the next he pleads with it to accept a tax cut. One day he venerates brains, and the next he tries to popularise walking.

“Trying to popularise walking in America is like trying to popularise Prohibition in Kentucky. Asking a citizen to walk instead of ride in America is like asking a Frenchman to drink milk instead of wine. And the last French premier who did that, Pierre Mendès-France, was booted out of office.

“President Kennedy himself is a living symbol of the dangers of exercise. So long as he concentrated on history, literature and politics, he was all right. But the minute he picked up a spade and started digging a hole for an Arbor Day tree in Canada, his back buckled and he’s been a rocking-chair case ever since.”