David J Black

Travel writing, as a literary genre has many guises. The Fodors, Rough Guides, and Baedekers are on-the-hoof advisories. My 1912 Egyptian edition of the latter, for example, advised not shaving on the Nile for fear of your steamer striking a sandbank. James (later Jan) Morris’s 1960 classic on

Scotland has never quite had an artist like John Bellany, and probably never will again. Correction: delete ‘probably’. His work has had a force and an impact which few of his generation could replicate, and he was so doggedly sui generis that we must hesitate to classify him as simply S