Alan Taylor speaking at the St Andrews Book Festival
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CreativityTranscript
00:00I'm with Alan Taylor at the St Andrew's Book Festival, and you've just talked about your book, Edinburgh, The Autobiography.
00:08I wanted to ask you, Alan, of all the entries in that book, it's a very buried list, who are the two who are probably the most unalike?
00:21Unalike? Well, one of them that's very unalike is by Hunter S. Thompson, the great gonzo of journalism, because what is his association with Edinburgh?
00:31The ironic thing is the piece that he has written is about not getting to Edinburgh, which tells the story of how he was invited to the Edinburgh Book Festival,
00:41and then for whatever reasons, as he describes in the piece, he didn't make it.
00:46And so it was a fantastic scandal at the time, it was on the front page of every national newspaper, and there it was.
00:52It's just a wonderful piece of writing, actually.
00:56And which piece of writing would you say conjured up an actual event as opposed to a non-event?
01:03To a non-event? Oh, that's a very interesting question. An actual event.
01:09Which brings it to life and makes you imagine it in your head as actually happening?
01:17Wow, David, that is a very interesting question.
01:20I don't really think in terms of events, because I think events sort of suggest great battles, assassinations, that kind of thing.
01:28And although battles and the like did happen in Edinburgh, and the castle was held under siege and things like this, there's nothing like that in the piece.
01:37But I guess the kind of great event, the 18th century event, was the Porteous Riots and Walter Scott's description of them.
01:49I think that's very good. I think anything by Scott is good.
01:53Anything by Robert Louis Stevenson is good.
01:56Scott could describe events like that, whereas Stevenson seemed to sort of get the character of Edinburgh better than almost anybody else I can think of.
02:05And finally, the one I always mention is Muriel Spark, who takes us into the 20th century and lets us see what Edinburgh was really like in the 1920s and the 1930s,
02:17when it was really poverty-stricken, when it was very grey and dank and dirty and parochial and uncultured.
02:24And I feel she actually puts me there in a way that nobody else does.
02:29The curious thing also is that the three greatest Scottish writers, Scott, Stevenson and Spark, all have their surnames beginning with the letter S.
02:38Yeah.
02:39I think there's a thesis in that somewhere.
02:41And of course, as regards 20th century writers, you've met many of them, including, of course, Demuriel.
02:49But what about the ones that you never met who have written about Edinburgh?
02:55Which of those would you have liked to have met?
02:57Well, I would like to have met James Hogg, for example.
03:00I would like to have met Robert Burns, who arrived in Edinburgh like a huge celebrity and was feted everywhere he went.
03:09It would have been great to have met him.
03:11I think these are the kind of great characters that Edinburgh kind of threw up.
03:16It would have been wonderful to meet Adam Smith and David Hume.
03:20I would have loved to have met Henry Rayburn, the great portrait painter, the man who painted the skating minister, which again is emblematic of Edinburgh.
03:31Here you have a minister of the church who's supposed to be very buttoned up, very straight-laced, very John Knoxian.
03:38But what's he doing? He's not sort of staring at the painter so that you're getting his full-on portrait.
03:43You've got him skating joyfully across Duddingston Lock as if in defiance of the church.
03:48I think that's a fantastic portrait of Edinburgh in a way that you don't expect it to be.
03:54It's a very familiar image.
03:56Yes, indeed.
03:57Okay, that's great.
03:59It was a very good talk that you gave there, very enjoyable, as indeed is the book.
04:04Thank you very much, Alan Taylor.
04:05Thank you, David.