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“... better than a conjuring trick.’ The image of the novelist as a disreputable conjuror is one that Alasdair Gray uses in Lanark (1981), and Szabó shares with Gray both a mundane view of the artist’s calling and a respect for the artist’s unsung abettors. Gray punctiliously ...”

“... is to portray New York life at its brightest and darkest – to present (in a phrase which Alasdair Gray used of Dickens and Hugo) ‘a rich social variety in a strong moralising sauce’. This moralising is expressed through plot rather than explicit commentary. Russell misbehaves himself both financially and sexually (although on the latter ...”

“... 1890s, along with self-government. Which is why Geddes – a recurrent presence in the novels of Alasdair Gray – counts as a patron of devolution, and indeed of that peaceable civic Europe in which Gray’s ‘Scottish Co-operative Wholesale Republic’ would find its place. The outcome has been rather ...”

“... Hobsbaum, who in his later academic career encouraged many writers, including Seamus Heaney and Alasdair Gray, got him to read Nineteen Eighty-Four, which Livingstone reckons influenced his political beliefs more than any other book. Raymond Rivers, his biology teacher, stimulated his lifelong enthusiasm for reptiles and amphibians, which reached ...”

“... writing to count again on the British scene after a post-war doldrum. Canongate have published Alasdair Gray, most innovative of Scottish novelists, and made available at least an adequate, small bilingual selection of the chief living Gaelic poet, Sorley Maclean. Mainstream have brought into print again, after a long hibernation in the second-hand ...”

“... Craig wrote in 2003, ‘it had much earlier declared cultural devolution,’ with everyone from Alasdair Gray to the Proclaimers providing Scotland with representation in lieu of the Assembly that failed to appear in 1979. ‘If politics and votes were the means of bringing the parliament into existence, they were not its direct cause,’ according to ...”

“... In his contribution to the recent collection Unstated: Writers on Scottish Independence, Alasdair Gray addresses the native-immigrant distinction – natives implicitly, immigrants explicitly. He divides immigrants into two kinds: ‘Immigrants into Scotland, as into other lands, are settlers or colonists. English settlers are as much a part of ...”

“... Class counted. In retrospect, this episode recalled the subterranean Institute in Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, where the delegates to an interminable conference spectate on the external world via an immense camera obscura. Gray probably stole this contraption from the Edinburgh Outlook Tower of his hero ...”

“... what they need in Selbourne. One problem is that Selbourne (like a somewhat kindred spirit, John Gray) is very hostile to the laissez-faire enthusiasms of the past 15 years. His animus against the Labour Party is, for obvious reasons, fiercer than his dislike of the Conservative Party, but his conviction that enterprises which serve the public good should be ...”

“... thoughts which people – such as those on the receiving end of its power – have about it. As Alasdair MacIntyre pointed out long ago, this dims the prospects for a would-be science of comparative politics. It equally dims the outlook for a general theory of political legitimacy. It might be thought that moralism was a disorder of left-liberals. But it ...”