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“... James Kennaway’s last book, the novella Silence, begins like this:     The doctor thought: I wish I could believe her. I wish I could take her story at face value. I wish I could accept what the Sister had to say. I wish I could say I were a simple man, but none of us can say that any more ... The doctor is in a movie-house which he soon leaves to go to his son-in-law’s club:     On Sunday afternoons, in the wintertime, the club organised concerts ...”

“... slips in events and yet present us with personalities and relationships that are not believable. Allan Massie in The Hanging Tree, a sortie into the Borders in the Middle Ages, hinges a significant part of his plot on the issue of rape, in happy ignorance of the drastic limitations on the legal definition of rape in Medieval Scotland. Catherine Cookson ...”

“... them deal with bed-wetting, a sad problem for sufferers and not much fun to read about. However, Allan Massie’s novel about Caesar Augustus may attract attention, if only for its grand ambition. The first Roman Emperor was only 18 when he began to take over the world and he was nearly eighty when he crowned his brilliant career by becoming a ...”

“... all the view happens to include. What matters is the truthfulness of what it does show, and Allan Massie is strikingly detached and truthful, leaving it to the reader to observe and judge. Not that this means that in a literal sense he tells the truth about the Scottish landed classes. His subject is a way of life with very little sustenance in ...”

“... anything, or is simply an overblown caprice, may depend on the susceptibilities of the reader. Allan Massie’s development as a novelist has been less ambitious, though with each novel he has become more solid, circumstantial and impressive. The Death of Men, his third, though it lacks the very individual mordant melancholy of The Last Peacock, is ...”

“... A Scottish Poetry Book, compiled by Alan Bold, and Edinburgh and the Borders in Verse, edited by Allan Massie. Bold’s book, presumably intended for children, is illustrated in several styles, sometimes almost to the extinction of the poem. McGonagall gets three poems, about 170 lines in all, MacDiarmid five poems with about half that number. ...”

“... has stuck firmly in the work of popular novelists from Rosemary Sutcliff to Bernard Cornwell and Allan Massie, and (in this case with strident claims to historical accuracy) in movies like Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur (2004). Fleming ignores the phenomenon, and the scenario. It isn’t the only piece of historical tradition she rejects. Right at the ...”