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1 week ago | 
scotsman.com | Stuart Kelly
Readers who experience a shudder of déjà vu on seeing the title of this book, or indeed the author’s listing in the Edinburgh International Book Festival programme, are not losing their senses.
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2 weeks ago | 
scotsman.com | Stuart Kelly
To convey the scope and subtlety of Sam Dalrymple’s book, rather than refer readers to the subtitle – “Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia” – it is better, I think, to sketch the outline of stories which encapsulate its capacity to fray and unpick preconceptions. In 1929-31 Gandhi travelled the breadth of “British India”; from Aden (now in Yemen) to Rangoon (now in Myanmar, formerly Burma).
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3 weeks ago | 
scotsman.com | Stuart Kelly
Here’s the quick answer to the question posed in the title of this book by Devi Sridhar, Professor and Chair of Global Health at the University of Edinburgh and advisor to the Scottish and UK Governments, as well as the World Health Organisation, UNICEF and UNESCO: be the kind of person who buys hardback books and has £22 of disposable income (≈24% of the weekly Job Seeker’s Allowance).
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1 month ago | 
msn.com | Stuart Kelly
Microsoft Cares About Your PrivacyMicrosoft and our third-party vendors use cookies to store and access information such as unique IDs to deliver, maintain and improve our services and ads. If you agree, MSN and Microsoft Bing will personalise the content and ads that you see. You can select ‘I Accept’ to consent to these uses or click on ‘Manage preferences’ to review your options and exercise your right to object to Legitimate Interest where used.
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1 month ago | 
scotsman.com | Stuart Kelly
In Charlotte Runcie’s new novel, set during the Edinburgh Fringe, an actress takes inventive revenge on a theatre critic who sleeps with her after panning her show. Review by Stuart KellyIf Graham Greene is correct and an author requires a splinter of ice in their heart, then a critic needs a glacier; along with a brass neck, an iron constitution, steel nerves, and possibly an acid tongue.
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1 month ago | 
scotsman.com | Stuart Kelly
This is a terribly accomplished novel, and I am unsure if that is a compliment or a criticism. It has an affecting core scenario, some extremely engaging writing, some very interesting observations; and yet I found it, at some gut level, manufactured, or as if it had palpable designs on eliciting a particular response. Moss has written eight other novels, and is much admired by novelists whose opinion I respect, and yet this felt somehow fabricated.
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1 month ago | 
scotsman.com | Stuart Kelly
When I had finished reading this tremendous biography, I was so exhilarated and intrigued that I started to look for archive footage of Gertrude Stein. Although I found some, far more gobsmacking was a clip from a 1978 Swedish film (in ten languages) with none other than Bernard Cribbins as Gertude Stein and Wilfrid Brambell (Steptoe Snr.) as her life-partner, gatekeeper and muse, Alice B Toklas. It is absurd, unsettling, wry and provocative, much like the real Stein.
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1 month ago | 
scotsman.com | Stuart Kelly
If you’re ever lucky enough to be in a church meeting, there is a fun game you can play: betting with yourself on how long it will be before someone says “young people”. Bemoaning their lack is mandatory and never, ever say “why don’t we not do whatever we did to their parents’ generation, or their parents’ parents’ generation, because whatever it was we did do, it quite evidently didn’t work”. I say that as, at fifty-two, I am often the youngest in the congregation.
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1 month ago | 
scotsman.com | Stuart Kelly
The provocative title of Robert Macfarlane’s new book brought to mind a favourite couplet by the ingenious, wry Scottish poet Frank Kuppner: “God is real, but not as we use the word ‘real’. / Or, for that matter, as we use the word ‘God’.” The semantic hair-splitting evaporates if we invoke the German philosopher Hans Vaihinger’s concept of “Als Ob” or “as if”.Macfarlane is less concerned with the metaphysics of rivers than with the ethics.
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2 months ago | 
scotsman.com | Stuart Kelly
Alice Mah grew up in British Columbia and is now Professor of Urban and Environmental Studies at Glasgow University, and this work, encompassing memoir, polemic, migration and climate science, is subtitled “an offering”; though it might as easily have been glossed as “an exercise in hauntology”. At the end, looking from the Necropolis towards the UK’s largest onshore windfarm, she sees the turbines as “emblems of a promised future, yet already it feels post-apocalyptic”.
