The Sir Duncan Rice Library appears as an intrusion in the landscape, or at least as an intrusion on my imagining of what the landscape of Old Aberdeen is meant to be: all ornate medieval monuments with parapets and belfries and buttresses carved from granite. Eight storeys high, the building sits on its own, on the western edge of King’s College, and appears to be constructed entirely of glass.
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In early 2016 I went to Bali for a friend’s 40th birthday. I was to meet a group of friends from all over the world for a week of sun, sea, seafood and Bintang. I went over early, renting an …
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Part elegy, part bildungsroman, Patti Smith’s Just Kids, winner of the National Book Award for Non-Fiction in 2010, recounts the formative years in the lives of Patti and Robert Mapplethorpe, lovers and friends, muses and makers. In 1966, while studying …
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In May 1990, after graduating from Emory University, 22-year-old Chris McCandless told his parents he was taking a road trip. ‘I think I’m going to disappear for a while,’ he said. Over the next few months he abandoned his car …
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The Ghost at the Wedding, Shirley Walker’s 2010 memoir of her mother-in-law Jessie, explores the devastating impact the First and Second World Wars had on the soldiers themselves, as well as the women left at home. She does so with …
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Children are always episodes in someone else’s narrative, not their own people, but brought forth into being for particular purposes. So wrote historian Carolyn Steedman in her 1986 memoir Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives,which contrasts …
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