The lives of Scottish artists Bobby MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun, who found love and fame and lost it all, are vividly reimagined
What if the protagonist of a novel was not a single person but a couple? Damian Barr takes on this challenge, and he’s found a historic couple who make the ideal source material. Working-class Scottish artists Bobby MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun were rarely apart after they met in 1933. They lived and worked together, became famous together and then declined into desperate squalor together – even poorer than when they began.
Barr knows what it’s like to conquer Glasgow from a small, working-class town on its outskirts; he knows what it’s like to find yourself feted for your portraits of the place you’ve left irrevocably behind. His memoir, Maggie and Me, was a hard-hitting yet rambunctious tale of growing up gay near Motherwell under Thatcher, uneasily aware that the woman who pushed his parents deeper into poverty also taught him that the ruthless exercise of his talents offered his escape. He expanded his exploration of how brutality can take hold in his novel You Will Be Safe Here, set in South Africa. Now he returns to Scotland in this moving meditation on art, love and home.
From Shakespeare’s fools to Donald Trump, this exhilarating read considers stupidity in its many forms
Stupidity, no question, can be just as rich and subtle as its opposite. Three and a half decades on, I still sometimes meditate on what a school friend of mine said in a here’s-a-profound-thought tone of voice: “I’d rather be stupid than happy”.
In this clever book, Stuart Jeffries starts out at a double disadvantage, though. First: he has an excellently snappy title but it’s open to question whether stupidity can be said to have a history in any meaningful sense. The quality of stupidity is just, sort of, there; and there’s lots of it. Could you write a history of happiness, or bad luck, or knees? You’d be on firmer ground, as he recognises, historicising the concept of stupidity: a short history, in other words, of “stupidity” – how successive societies and thinkers have defined and responded to reason’s derr-brained secret sharer. As an intellectual historian who has written smart and chewy popular books about the Frankfurt School (Grand Hotel Abyss) and postmodernism (Everything, All the Time, Everywhere), he certainly has the chops for it.
Nhận thấy người đàn ông Trung Quốc đang trở thành nạn nhân của kẻ lừa đảo, cảnh sát đã vào cuộc điều tra và phát hiện nguyên nhân bất ngờ.
Công an tỉnh Bắc Ninh mới đây đã công bố danh sách các phương tiện vi phạm trật tự an toàn giao thông đường bộ từ ngày 22/8/2025 đến 28/8/2025.BMW Motorrad Vision CE: Tầm Nhìn Tương Lai Của Phương Tiện Di Chuyển Đô Thị Điện Vào ngày 1 tháng 9 năm 2025, tại triển lãm IAA Mobility 2025, BMW Motorrad – bộ phận xe máy của Tập đoàn BMW – đã chính thức ra mắt mẫu concept BMW Motorrad Vision CE. Đây không chỉ […]
The post BMW Motorrad Vision CE mô tô điện đột phá đậm chất camping appeared first on Motosaigon.
