Guest speaker: Scottish actor & playwright Matthew Zajac, who will be also performing his critically acclaimed play THE TAILOR OF INVERNESS – the first performance of this play in France
I never felt so much
Since I have felt at all
The tingling smell and touch
Of dogrose and sweet briar,
Nettles against the wall,
All sours and sweets that grow
Together or apart
In hedge or marsh or ditch…
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck…
“Muir’s contact with Europe is significant, however, not only in a personal and literary sense, but also in a wider political context which resonates with our own early twenty-first century times. His travels in the 1920s immediately after the end of World War One, and again at the end of World War Two, tell a story of Europe itself at critical points in its history.”
Broad in the beam? More broad in sympathy.
Stiff in the joints? More flexible in mind.
Deaf on the right? New voices from the Left
In politics and art more clearly sound…
The Scottish Novel in 1824
1 July, University of Edinburgh – free
This one-day in-person symposium marks the bicentenary of 1824, an ‘annus mirabilis’ in the history of Scottish fiction that saw the publication of two experimental masterpieces: James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs & Confessions of a Justified Sinner, & Walter Scott’s Redgauntlet.
A multi-day conference is planned for Glasgow in summer 2025 (dates TBD) to mark the quatercentenary of the death of James VI & I. Please register your interest via the online form (NB this is NOT a CFP)
Addendum: we should address the 🐘 in the room… in case of confusion, there is of course a FICTIONAL “John Galt”, created by a very famous American author, whose towering influence on literature still resonates today…
…of course I speak of the late, great Robert E. Howard, whose character “John Galt” appears in the short story “Black Talons”, published in STRANGE DETECTIVE STORIES, Dec 1933 (it’s not one of his best, though—stick to #Conan the Barbarian)
…we turned it over, read easily One Pound,
but then the shock of Latin, like a gloss,
Respublica Scotorum, sent across
such ages as we guessed but never found…
—Edwin Morgan, “The Coin”
““The Coin’ … slips infinite riches of cognitive possibility into the reader’s mental pockets”
The Paisley weaver poet & songwriter: celebrating Robert Tannahill
17 May, Royal Society of Edinburgh – free
Dissenting from prevailing notions that label Robert Tannahill (1774–1810) as “sweetly sentimental”, Prof Fred Freeman's lecture positions Tannahill as a major poet who expanded the tradition of British “rationalist” pastoralism.