• Colour drawing of a staged theatrical scene framed by two symmetrical classical structures with niches containing gilded statues, flanked by trees. At the centre, a painted backdrop shows an island within an archipelago, with a visible settlement; in the foreground, a vessel approaches the shore. Four figures stand before the backdrop holding branches and other objects. The composition is enclosed within a thin rectangular gold border.

Stands Scottish Literature Where It Did? Revisiting Devolution

It’s been fifteen years since the last fat volume of essays on contemporary Scottish writing. Only a blink of historical time, but it’s been quite an eventful period. When the chapters of Berthold Schoene’s brilliant Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature were being written, both the country and its debates looked rather different.

Q&A with Patrick O’Connor

Q. Tell us a bit about your book A. Cormac McCarthy, Philosophy and the Physics of the Damned is really a book about the importance of philosophy for literature. In it, I look at how one writer uses philosophy to…

Arthur Conan Doyle: Writing the Life

by Douglas Kerr There are dozens of biographies of Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and one of the most popular storytellers in English. But his own account of his life, Memories and Adventures, published in 1924, is…

C. S. Lewis and His Medieval Mirror

By Erik Eklund C. S. Lewis is best known for his introductory exposition of Christianity, Mere Christianity (1952), as well as his series of children’s books, The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–56), yet, notwithstanding his numerous theological works, his identity as…

Theologies of Reading

By Laura McCormick Kilbride, Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft, and Simone Kotva Is reading a theological activity? This is a question which only invites further questions. How a person responds to it will reveal as much about their presuppositions and their training…