Sublime

In his book The Crofter and the Laird, the American author John McPhee journeys to Colonsay, the tiny Hebridean island that was the home of his ancestors. Here, he discovers, ‘almost every rise of ground, every beach, field, cliff, gully, cave, and skerry has a name’. The island has only 138 inhabitants, but 1,600 place names.

The Scottish writer James Kelman described the eloquence of unlettered people with a gift for language as ‘orature’, the capacity to compel and

If you met Lewis in the street, you might guess that he was a lawyer or a kindly geography teacher. In fact, he was one of the most efficiently deadly men in the British services.

Briefly Carleton considered the other man, of whom he’d made such a study he might have been appointed professor of Thomas Studies at the University of Essex. He knew, for example, that Thomas was a confirmed bachelor, as they say, never seen in the company of a beautiful young person or a stately older one; that he had about him the melancholy rel