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“... the list includes Ben Okri, Michèle Roberts, Elizabeth Cook, Iain Sinclair, Tom Raworth and Irvine Welsh), the administrators told me ‘family fun’ was to be the mood. So instead, would I give a talk about The Wobbly Tooth, a little children’s book I wrote thirty years ago when my son Conrad lost his first tooth? I was astonished – pleased ...”

“... was equally keen to manipulate taste. He even set up a book club to promote his own publications. Irvine Welsh, Scotland’s highest profile recent literary exporter, is a master of the trumpet-blast, and scathingly obsessed with the topic of home. He also writes at times like a canny man with an MBA. All this noise, home-worship and canniness have ...”

“... O’Hagan himself has talked of the more general problem of reaching the chemical generation. If Irvine Welsh and his satanic kailyard alone seems to connect, that is the dimension of Scotland’s problem. Drugs make an unhelpful demography worse. Ireland often figures as an SNP paragon. It has its own drug problem, sure, but it lives off the high ...”

“... and whatever the changing nature of its cast and content – the underclass of Irvine Welsh, the denizens of Rushdie’s fables and those of other postcolonial Booker shoo-ins – it remains unperturbed by the idea that modernity simply cannot be accommodated in such securely cosy forms. When people say a contemporary novel is ...”

“... any help from the layout of the page. James Kelman indents his dialogue as a matter of course, and Irvine Welsh, following Joyce, accords his readers the additional courtesy of the French-style dash. McBride lets the registers mix within the paragraph, with results that are mostly worth the effort: ‘I make my breakfast. Eat that. Don’t look. Don’t ...”

“... husband were not matched in Scottish literature until the ‘Bang to Rites’ section of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, in which the self-confessedly rancid Renton has sex in a toilet with the heavily pregnant wife of his dead friend, whose funeral they are attending. Few conventional love lyrics survive in the Dunbar corpus – the amatory is ...”

“... in Gray and Kelman, of idealising old-fashioned working-class solidarity. Hence the habit, in Irvine Welsh, of going on and on about getting off your face. People need to shift for themselves and refuse to be bullied. Like the boy who ate the star rather than hand it over, leaving a trail of glorious stars ...”

“... Hogg is the Proleptic Shepherd – Hogg our contemporary – whose work foreshadows Frost, Irvine Welsh, Kafka, Beckett, William McGonagall and the Incredible String Band. Davie Tait’s style of praying in The Brownie of Bodsbeck anticipates the ‘New Christianity of the 1960s’. Bits of The Three Perils of Man ‘read like a pre-run of the ...”

“... of the Scottish political class. It has earned praise from Nicola Sturgeon, J.K. Rowling and Irvine Welsh, the latter two providing glowing quotes for the book’s cover, and has received positive reviews. It’s worth noting that one element of his critique which hasn’t been embraced concerns class: the journalist Dani Garavelli argued in the ...”

“... is a Scotophile. He was one of the stars at a recent Edinburgh Book Festival and is a friend of Irvine Welsh. He wears an outsize cloth cap, chocolate-coloured, at all times. Turashvili said that it would be a cultural disaster if Georgia decided to follow the fashion and fancy itself a European nation – which, to him, is a euphemism for the ...”

“... them off towards federalism like ferrets after a rabbit. The idea of excluding Scottish and Welsh MPs from decisions on the English NHS, English schools and English housing has put Labour – extraordinarily negative about its own future as an English party – on the back foot. Most attractively for Cameron, it would enable him to woo Ukip supporters ...”

“... looked very much like the end of civilisation as they had come to know it.We know that English and Welsh appeals could be brought before either house of Parliament until, in the early 15th century, the Commons at its own request was relieved of judicial business, leaving the Lords as the only forum to which appeals could go. There are scattered records from ...”

“... In June last year, the lord chancellor, Lord Irvine, was dismissed in a cabinet reshuffle. It was announced, not to Parliament but by press release, that his office was not to be filled and that his department was to become part of the Department for Constitutional Affairs, headed by a newly appointed minister, Lord Falconer ...”

“... days later Mallory, who was 38, around the peak age for physical endurance, and his friend Andrew Irvine, 22, an Oxford rowing blue, set off with the primitive, heavy oxygen apparatus of the time for a last attempt at the summit, swathed in cloud. Just after noon the clouds briefly cleared. The expedition’s geologist, Noel Odell, looking up from two ...”

“... are one or two odd repetitions and discontinuities that may be signs of haste. Mysteriously, ‘Welsh hymnody lies outside the scope of this book,’ though American hymnody is examined – and rightly so, if only because so many Victorian hymns which have become popular in Britain are of American authorship. (Conversely, we learn from Bradley about the ...”