Of Me and Others. Alasdair GrayЧитать онлайн книгу.
rel="nofollow" href="#ud7e4fb27-2a97-5da0-93ee-c750fe7b8b30">1983 Modest Proposal for Bypassing a Predicament
1985 Of Alasdair Taylor, Painter
1986 Five Glasgow Artists Show: Catalogue Essay
1986 Of John Glashan – A Letter
1988 Of Ian Hamilton Finlay – A Letter
1989 A Radio Talk on Allegory for Scottish Schools
1990 Of Elspeth King – A Friend Unfairly Treated
1990 MCGROTTY AND LUDMILLA: Epilogue
1990 Preface to J. Withers’ Glasgow Archipelago
1990 SOMETHING LEATHER: Epilogue
1990 Of Pierre Lavalle – Catalogue Introduction
1991 Of Andrew Sykes – Short Story Postscript
1991 THE FALL OF KELVIN WALKER: Introduction
1992 POOR THINGS: Acknowledgements, Prologue
1993 Of Anthony Burgess – Obituary
1996 Of Bill MacLellan – Obituary
1997 WORKING LEGS: How This Play Got Written
1999 Preface to Books of Jonah, Micah & Nahum
2000 THE BOOK OF PREFACES: Postscript
2000 16 OCCASIONAL VERSES: Endnotes
2004 THE DECLARATION OF CALTON HILL
2004 Introduction to The Knuckle End
2005 Of Philip Hobsbaum – Obituary
2008 Of Archie Hind – Dear Green Place Epilogue
2009 OLD MEN IN LOVE: Epilogue by S. Workman
2009 An Upper Clyde Falls Mural
2012 Hillhead Subway Station Mural
2013 Of John Connolly – Obituary
2018 HELL: Dante’s Trilogy Part 1: Foreword
POSTSCRIPT
Foreword
MY LAST BOOK WAS CALLED A Life in Pictures. This one might have been called A Life in Prose. It contains reminiscences and essays written between 1952 and 2014 about my own works and those of-friends. Marginal and footnotes give dates of writing or publication. The earliest piece is a speculative essay, apart from which the rest describe what I think facts, though readers will dismiss some as opinions. Three, though mainly factual, diverge into fiction for reasons the notes also explain. My life as a professional author connects most of them. I have improved a few sentences so that my younger self sometimes seems to write better than he did, but no other changes suggest I was wiser in those days than I am now.
I thought this book would turn out to be a ragbag of interesting scraps. I now think it has the unity of a struggle for a confident culture, a struggle shared with a few who became good friends and thousands I have never met. Every nation has periods of lesser and greater assurance. When I was twenty-one the Scotland I knew was confident in the many goods it made and exported, but many educated people had very little confidence in Scottish visual and literary art, not because we lacked them, but because our education had stopped us seeing them. I believed all good books by Scots must be published in London and would fail if not praised by English book reviewers; also that artists wishing to live by their art had better follow the example of Labour politicians and go to London. This explains the querulous tone of many early essays. I felt my nation was treated as a province, even by many who lived here. I wanted that to stop.
Being twelve years old when the 2nd World War ended, I belonged to the first generation to benefit by the welfare state in both healthcare and education. Unlike post-Thatcher children we had grants to attend art schools and universities without getting