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“... had been well and truly forked off their lives. With the notable exceptions of Magnus Mills and James Kelman, most British writers don’t make a habit of writing about what’s at the centre of most people’s lives. And I don’t mean sex: that’s peripheral, like God. The last great English novel about work, about its anxieties, distortions and ...”

“... seize on any pairings that offered themselves (‘his antagonisms and his ingratiations’ – of James Kelman; ‘drugs … poured their balm, but embalmed him’ – of Robert Lowell; ‘Emmas, Cockburn and Rothschild’ – a Listener cover line; ‘Gray’s Elegy, and Wynne Godley’s’ – an LRB cover line), was always there but became more ...”

“... but the puffs of smoke have yet to ascend from the City of London. Habemus Papam. His Holiness James Kelman? That would be a turn-up for the Booker. I would imagine that Sister Margaret Atwood, or Brother Banville, is more likely to win the prize. On the short list is Rose Tremain, who teaches at the University of East Anglia. Two of the judges are ...”

“... of the prudes. But perhaps we will be expected to have come to terms by now with the Scots of James Kelman and Irvine Welsh, noting that the proportion of obscene language seems to be even higher in demotic Scots than in demotic English, at any rate in novels. Somebody should look into this matter. The work ‘fuck’ and its derivatives were timidly ...”

“... have been said by someone in the book – and it becomes anything but awful. Think of the hoops James Kelman has had to wedge himself through to close the gap between narrative and dialogue; then think of Ford and that all-accommodating, middle-of-the-road voice that is equally at home either side of inverted commas. As in The Sportswriter, much of the ...”

“... point of view we experience the world, at the smallest remove from the first person ‘I’ – as James Kelman put it, not so much written from a character’s viewpoint as over his shoulder. In a writer like Kelman, Bellow or Coetzee, it’s a means to great work. Used as a default by less accomplished writers, the ...”

“... thought it was so funny – I started it, having picked it up from something I’d been reading by James Kelman. Death, death, death, death, death, death, death.I met her in September 1989, on my first day at City Limits, the co-operatively run London entertainments magazine set up by the leftier of the Time Out journalists after a long and bitter ...”

“... as professor of creative writing at Glasgow University, a position shared with Tom Leonard and James Kelman; and nice gigs as a celebrity designer of murals at Hillhead subway station and at the Oran Mór arts centre. In terms of politics, however, Gray and the new Glasgow are at loggerheads. In 1990 he lampooned the European City of Culture ...”

“... people exist independently of your projections of them, that you get in the superficially similar James Kelman. It’s a bit static and solipsistic. One reason for this might be that Parks writes so much. The going-on-and-on problem – writing stuff that looks like nice prose, but doesn’t really mean much – does tend to happen when you work to ...”

“... of naming: the Frasers were old London friends of Mary Crawford, there’s a Maria here whom James (Henry Crawford and Edmund Bertram) goes off with, and there’s Fanny, as the Frasers call her, although she tells us at once that she does not like to be called this. What Fanny Price wins is what this Fanny desires: love that is open, innocent and simple ...”

“... the empire market, Scots proved fast learners. It was two enterprising Scots, William Jardine and James Matheson, who forced opium on China in the 1820s. Their work was continued by Scottish bureaucrats like James Bruce, the 8th earl of Elgin, whose father stole the Parthenon Marbles from Greece. ‘I never felt so ashamed ...”

“... who said horrible things about the plebeian Joyce, and about the girls who worked at Woolworths; James Kelman acted like a barbarian at the Booker dinner, and so on. Most of these commentators imagine themselves to be writing a form of intellectual history when they are only pouring gossip into fancy goblets at London book parties. They experience ...”

“... escape to Edinburgh’. He gave it to his father, who read it, ‘and went back to his bookshelf: James Bond, Where Eagles Dare’. So Rankin gave James Kelman’s first book to his father. His sort of thing, I thought. Working-class working man against the system. Dad couldn’t read it. Said it wasn’t ‘written ...”

“... read alongside that of the African-American Trey Ellis, the Latina Sandra Cisneros and the Scot James Kelman, rather than other Irish-Americans. Stephens’s books, Season at Coole and The Brooklyn Book of the Dead, present a family enduring a back-to-front version of the American Dream. The Coole family goes to the suburbs but does not assimilate or ...”

“... a schoolteacher, gradually becoming, in the late 1980s, a full-time writer – much encouraged by James Kelman, who discovered her work in a short-story competition. She is known mainly for three novels: The Trick Is to Keep Breathing (1989), the tale of a young teacher’s emotional collapse; Foreign Parts (1994), in which Cassie and Rona, West of ...”