12th November 2025
Alan Taylor has been a journalist for over three decades. In 2017 Alan wrote the best-selling and beguiling Appointment in Arezzo: A friendship with Muriel Spark, and in 2022 edited the mesmerising and witty Madly, Deeply: The Alan Rickman Diaries. Most recently he has assembled biographies of Edinburgh and Glasgow, both fascinating portraits of Scotland’s two great cities. Remarkable stories of body-snatching, murder, drunkenness, drug taking, sex and shopping, as well as rants against inclement weather and the City Councils, will serve to entertain and amuse you on this winter’s afternoon.
Biography
Alan Taylor was Deputy and Managing Editor at The Scotsman, and Associate Editor of the Sunday Herald. He has contributed to numerous publications including the Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker and The Melbourne Age; edited several acclaimed anthologies, including The Assassin’s Cloak (2000); and is the co-founder of The Scottish Review of Books.
Alan’s best-selling Appointment in Arezzo: A friendship with Muriel Spark is an intimate, fond and funny memoir of one of the greatest novelists of the last century. This colourful, personal, anecdotal, indiscreet and admiring memoir charts the course of Muriel Spark’s life, revealing her as she really was. The book was published in 2018 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Muriel’s birth.
Glasgow: The Autobiography (2023) 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, the result is a varied and vivid portrait of one of the world’s great cities in all its grime and glory. From one of the earliest mentions of its name in the 6th century to the Covid lockdowns of the 21st, Edinburgh: The Autobiography (2024) is a magnificent portrait of one of the world’s great cities in its many iterations, from ‘Edinburgh, the sink of abomination’ to the Athens of the North and everything – including the home of the Enlightenment, the Festival City, the Aids Capital of Europe and a Mecca for tourists seeking tartan tat – in between.
