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“... According to Stevenson’s wishes, his letters were first presented to the public by his friend, the art historian Sidney Colvin. Colvin, described by Stevenson as a ‘difficult, shut up, noble fellow’, did the job reasonably conscientiously. He was, however, an arch-bowdleriser, using, as he said, ‘the editorial privilege of omission without scruple where I thought it desirable’ and painstakingly altering the novelist’s ‘bloody’ to ‘beastly’, his ‘constipation’ to ‘indigestion’ and his ‘God grant’ to ‘I only hope ...”

“... Robert​ Louis Stevenson was always ill, that’s what people said, and in the late summer of 1884 he decided he wouldn’t return to the South of France, where he’d spent the past year and a half in a house called La Solitude. His wife, Fanny, sought the advice of his London doctors, who recommended Davos in the Swiss mountains as being cholera-free, but Stevenson fancied southern England ...”

“... shipwreck, showmanship, early death – also bring to mind the life and career of Robert LouisStevenson, another Scottish writer who looked at human adventure as a brand of metaphysics. Nowadays, people with a heart for proper adventure (or ‘extreme sports’) like to load themselves with equipment ...”

“... there is nothing Scottish about any of them. Percy Scholes, The Oxford Companion to Music Like Robert LouisStevenson living in Samoa, like George MacBeth living in Sheffield, like Ian Brady living in Greater Manchester, I am a Scotsman living in exile; my father was the first of the family to fly South – my ...”

“... Castle – a nightly feast in August as the military tattoo concludes its parade. In his boyhood, Robert LouisStevenson would sometimes be surprised while walking in the New Town to ‘see a perspective of a mile or more of falling street, and beyond that woods and villas, and a blue arm of sea, and the hills upon the ...”

“... that has become a ruling obsession, and turned into a lifelong game of Bezique. A change in R. L. Stevenson’s reputation has come about since such masters of modern fantasy as Borges and Calvino have acknowledged him as a forerunner. I find their high regard for him a bit strange, as if based, as in the notorious case of the French view of Edgar Allan ...”

“... John Singer Sargent’s ‘Robert LouisStevenson and His Wife’ (1885). The first return to Treasure Island was made by Robert LouisStevenson himself. Fourteen years after the novel was published, Longman’s Magazine published ‘The Persons of the Tale’, in which Captain Smollett and Long John Silver step out of the narrative after the 32nd chapter to have a chat ‘in an open place not far from the story ...”

“... Ian Bell protests his disqualifications as a biographer rather too much: ‘I have approached Stevenson in the most unscholarly way. I am a journalist, and do not pretend to be anything else.’ But Bell, as he is at pains to point out, is a Scottish journalist and it is through the privilege of shared race and place of origin that he claims a blood-intimacy denied scholars ...”

“... pleasure: narcotic, sexual, fiscal – it has not been a particularly auspicious one either. For Robert LouisStevenson, literary impersonation wasn’t only an essential tutelary tool but also a way for mature authors to widen their range. Out of imitation, Stevenson felt, could ...”

“... still rich in hints of the life savoured by its great authors, from Dunbar to Norman MacCaig and Robert Garioch. The heyday of its literary, cultural and philosophic life lasted for a hundred years to the death of Scott and left its mark on Europe and America. An ancient city, a capital, with authors of all kinds, from Gavin Douglas to James Boswell to Annie ...”

“... reminder of primitive and innocent reading experiences. Something very similar was aimed at by Robert LouisStevenson, and in Our Ancestors Calvino has a beautiful description of the Stevensonian romance: ‘To him, writing meant translating an invisible text containing the quintessential fascination of all ...”

“... is the story of a woman who travels to Norway with thirty sex-starved sailors and a man called Stevenson – who may be based on Borges, who admired Robert LouisStevenson. Williamson presents Borges’s visit to St Andrews as a coming to terms with his early lost love.The New ...”

“... by the Brontës, Dickens and Thackeray and nearly everything that he could find associated with Robert LouisStevenson. He also had a number of trophy items like Shakespeare’s First Folio (though copies of the Folio were not so hard to find: his contemporary Henry Folger collected 79). In 1912 the Wideners visited ...”

“... from The Year’s Afternoon, presents an altogether more benevolent vision of life at sea, as Robert LouisStevenson launches Dunn on the ‘Seven Seas’ pollutionless stretches that wander for miles and miles’. The ending is unblushingly nostalgic: ‘Ah, Stevenson, your ...”

“... finds his father again in strange circumstances. The scene was once famous, at that high noon when Robert LouisStevenson thought Meredith second only to Shakespeare. Roy has become a sort of court jester for a German margravine and – to cut a long story short – has agreed to pose as a newly erected equestrian ...”