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“... began in 1985, with the postscript to Lean Tales, the short story collection he shared with Agnes Owens and James Kelman. ‘A director of a London publishing house,’ he wrote (in the third person), ‘asked him if he had enough stories to make another collection. Gray said no. There was a handful of stories he had intended to build into another ...”

“... the initial support of small publishers such as Polygon and Canongate, writers like Alasdair Gray, Agnes Owens, Thomas Healy, Tom Leonard, James Kelman and Janice Galloway have found the city a congenial location for their life and work, and their success is encouraging others. Of course, Glasgow has always had its writers. Torrington’s late Sixties ...”

“... trundles out of Glasgow Central, homesickness descends. Gray’s hero speaks for James Kelman and Agnes Owens – the collection’s other contributors – and for all writing north of the border ferociously indifferent to England and its literary culture: ‘I do not love Glasgow much, I sometimes actively hate it but I am at home here. In London this ...”

“... Inferno. To imagine themselves in Hell would seem excessively highfalutin’ to the characters in Agnes Owens’s novel, the hero of which is keeping his pecker up in dispiriting circumstances. Like Birds in the Wilderness is the title, and the wilderness is an urban one, with unemployment, frustration and dirty dealing conspicuous in it. Removal from ...”

“... and community disruption’ posited as the cause. From Gray and friends, such as Kelman and Agnes Owens, to Trainspotting and the Children of Albion Rovers; from split-shift hauf-and-a-hauf philosophising to just needing to get completely out of it, all the time. ‘Had there been television then I would have become an addict.’ If Gray had been a ...”