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Alan Taylor has been a journalist for over thirty years. He was deputy editor of the Scotsman, managing editor of Scotsman Publications, and writer-at-large for the Sunday Herald. He has edited several acclaimed anthologies, most recently Glasgow: The Autobiography. He has been a Booker Prize judge. He is the author of Appointment in Arezzo: A Friendship with Muriel Spark and, in 2018, series editor of the centenary editions of Spark’s novels. He is the co-founder and editor of the Scottish Review of Books.
Irene Taylor was born and brought up in Edinburgh. For many years she worked in public libraries. She has a degree in history from Edinburgh University and she now works for the National Trust for Scotland.
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Captain Robert Falcon Scott
Parsimony may be the end of this book. Also shame at my own verbosity, which comes over me when I see the – 20 it is – books shuffled together in my room. Who am I ashamed of? Myself reading them. Then Joyce is dead. Joyce about a fortnight younger than I am. I remember Miss Weaver, in wool gloves, bringing Ulysses in type-script to our tea-table at Hogarth House. Roger I think sent her. Would we devote our lives to printing it? The indecent pages looked so incongruous: she was spinsterly, buttoned up. And the pages reeled with indecency. I put it in the drawer of the inlaid cabinet. One day Katherine Mansfield came, and I had it out. She began to read, ridiculing: then suddenly said, But there’s something in this: a scene that should figure I suppose in the history of literature. He was about the place, but I never saw him. Then I remember Tom [T. S. Eliot] in Ottoline’s [Lady Ottoline Morell] room at Garsington saying – it was published then – how could anyone write again after achieving the immense prodigy of the last chapter. He was, for the first time in my knowledge, rapt, enthusiastic. I bought the blue paper book, and read it here one summer I think with spasms of wonder, of discovery, and then again with long lapses of intense boredom. This goes back to a pre-historic world. And now all the gents are furbishing up their opinions, and the books, I suppose, take their place in the long procession.
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