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Glasgow: The Autobiography

Glasgow: The Autobiography

Edited by Alan Taylor

Imprint: Birlinn

5.1 x 7.8 in

Paperback
9781780278032
May 2023
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$18.95

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Paperback
9781780274812
November 2017
Out of print. Available in digital formats at the links below.

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Glasgow: The Autobiography tells the story of the fabled, former Second City of the British Empire from its origins as a bucolic village on the rivers Kelvin and Clyde, through the tumult of the Industrial Revolution to the third millennium.

Including extracts from an astonishing array of contributors from Daniel Defoe, Dorothy Wordsworth and Dr Johnson to Evelyn Waugh and Dirk Bogarde, it also features the writing of bred-in-thebone Glaswegians such as Alasdair Gray, Liz Lochhead, James Kelman and 2020 Booker prize-winner Douglas Stuart. The result is a varied and vivid portrait of one of the world’s great cities in all its grime and glory – a place which is at once infuriating, inspiring, raucous, humourful and never, ever dull.

Alan Taylor has been a journalist for over 30 years. He was deputy and managing editor at the Scotsman, and for the last 15 years has been Writer-at-Large for the Sunday Herald. He has contributed to numerous publications, including The TLS, The New Yorker and The Melbourne Age, and edited three acclaimed anthologies - The Assassin's Cloak (2000), The Secret Annexe (2004) and The Country Dairies (2009).

[Alan Taylor] lays bare the city’s glorious contradictions. Glasgow: The Autobiography is his gift to us' ~Kevin McKenna, The National

a book with an enduring quality that you feel you will want to return to again and again ... the ideal book for anyone who lives or works in Glasgow, or has ever been to the city, or who has family roots there' ~Undiscovered Scotland

Alan Taylor deserves praise for his nous and nose …and has given it laldy' ~Stewart Conn, The TLS

If you know and love Glasgow, you'll love it. If you don't, you'll love it. It's a fine treasure-house – and even Glaswegians may learn something new from it' ~Allan Massie, Scotsman

These collected writings allowed me to dip here and there to uncover one unknown after another about my beloved Glasgow' ~Frank McAveety, Leader, Glasgow City Council