It has become a truism that we recover from a break-up as we might recover from drugs, and science proves it: that the level of oxytocin flooding the brain resembles the pleasure principle of a good fix. The removal of the loved one, or the drug, leaves us bodily distraught. Is there any filmmaker who has coincided with this idle scientific fact and turned it into an aesthetic ongoing first princi…
One of the many ways film can be commercial is through cynicism. This isn’t only or even especially the pragmatic assumptions producers will make about the amount of sex or violence a film should contain, or which actors can capture a given demographic through race, gender or a particular film territory. It may not even rest on the need for a happier ending than the film’s integrity de…
Scottish literature may appear minor next to English, French, Russian or Italian fiction. However, it still happens to be vast enough for any attempt at a summary in essay form to be foolish without winnowing the work down to a narrow corpus, a chiefly contemporary concern and a handful of stories. Many have surveyed a broader terrain — but even Alan Bold looked at only Modern Sottish Litera…
1 Perhaps in a very different way from my brother, it was always a question of power. How to enjoy the game without getting caught in the competition? I wouldn’t say I was impervious to the desire to win but it always seemed to me that the victory had to be one’s own no matter if I was playing with teammates, for the club, even for the town. My footballing career never went further tha…
Trainspotting is a bit of a mishmash, a book written in a mix of Scots, Scottish English and standard English. It might not even be a novel. Ian Bell reckoned “the book's structure, as much that of a collection of short stories as of a novel, means that the narrative itself feels like an exercise in futility.” (Guardian) Here we have a book full of Edinburgh heroin-takers, drunks, …