James Campbell

Bill Leader produced Bert Jansch’s debut album in 1964 at his London flat, with the record released by Transatlantic the following year. Jansch’s later album Jack Orion, recorded in another London flat in 1966, combined traditional songs and modern instrumentals and helped establish the folk baroque style.

Eddie Linden, the Scottish-Irish poet and longtime editor of Aquarius, died aged 88. The obituary recounts his traumatic childhood, experiences of abandonment and institutional care, struggles with literacy, Catholic guilt and alcoholism, and his eventual emergence in London’s literary world. Launched in 1969 with money saved from work as a library porter, Aquarius became his central achievement and featured leading writers including Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon. Linden published City of Razors and A Thorn in the Flesh, and was remembered for his memorised, mesmerising public recitations, charisma, vulnerability and enduring decency.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who died aged 101 from interstitial lung disease, is remembered as a poet, artist, activist and founder of San Francisco’s City Lights Bookstore and publishing house. Less conventionally “Beat” than his contemporaries, he combined anarchist and ecological politics with a commitment to accessible books and public cultural life. City Lights published his Pocket Poets series and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, whose obscenity prosecution helped make the press famous. The obituary also traces Ferlinghetti’s education, wartime service, poetry, novels, painting, family life and political activism, including his opposition to Viktor Orbán and his engagement with Cuba. He leaves a legacy spanning poetry, independent publishing and San Francisco’s literary culture.

Jim Haynes, who died aged 87, was an American-born writer, theatre director and impresario whose career centred on creating spaces for experimentation and social connection. He founded Edinburgh’s Paperback Bookshop and helped establish the Traverse Theatre and early international book festivals, later running London’s Arts Lab and contributing to countercultural publications and sexual-liberation projects. After moving to Paris, he taught at University of Paris VIII, published books through informal imprints and became known for welcoming diverse guests to his Sunday dinners. The obituary also acknowledges the limitations and harms of the era’s sexual politics, including Germaine Greer’s dispute over the unauthorised use of her image, as well as the legal and financial troubles that marked Haynes’s later life.

Alasdair Gray, who died aged 85, is remembered as a central figure in the late-20th-century renaissance of Scottish literature and art. His ambitious novel Lanark combined autobiography, science fiction, experimental structure and his own illustrations, influencing writers including Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, A.L. Kennedy and Janice Galloway. The obituary traces his working-class Glasgow upbringing, lifelong socialism and Scottish nationalism, career as a painter, illustrator, playwright and novelist, and major mural projects including the work at Oran Mor. It also covers his financial insecurity, personal relationships, health problems and late achievements, including his Dante project and the 2019 Saltire Society Scottish Lifetime Achievement award. He is survived by his son Andrew and a granddaughter.

JP Donleavy, the Brooklyn-born Irish-American novelist, died aged 91. He became famous with The Ginger Man, a multimillion-selling 1955 novel praised for its comic energy and experimental style but initially banned in Ireland. A prolonged legal battle with Olympia Press publisher Maurice Girodias eventually led Donleavy to take over and close the press. Although he published 13 novels and enjoyed major financial success, none matched his debut. The obituary portrays him as a combative, class-conscious and increasingly reclusive writer whose later work was uneven and whose hostility toward feminism and political correctness damaged his reputation. He spent much of his later life at Levington Park in County Westmeath, while continuing to write, paint and defend his literary legacy.

Alexandrina “Ina” Campbell, who died aged 95, was a pianist, Scottish country-dance teacher and church organist. Raised in Glasgow, she performed during wartime service in Portmahomack, later becoming an organist in Perthshire. While living in Buckinghamshire, she worked with children with special needs at Vinio House school and developed a form of music therapy. She is remembered by her family for her musical ear, community involvement and dedication to teaching, and is survived by four children, five grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

Shirley Hazzard, the acclaimed Australian-born novelist who died aged 85, is remembered for novels including The Transit of Venus and The Great Fire, as well as for her close but complicated friendship with Graham Greene. Her difficult childhood, international upbringing and years working for the United Nations shaped a fiction preoccupied with displacement, literature and disorder, while also inspiring fierce criticism of the UN’s bureaucracy, discrimination and Western political influence. Her marriage to writer and translator Francis Steegmuller was central to her life, and her later work included a memoir of Greene and dispatches from Naples. Hazzard won the US National Book Award for The Great Fire and defended ambitious, highbrow literature against the dominance of popular culture.

A review of the Centre Pompidou’s Beat Generation exhibition argues that Paris, particularly the Beat Hotel and Olympia Press, was central to the movement’s creative peak from 1957 to 1960. The exhibition brings together Kerouac’s original On the Road scroll, manuscripts by Ginsberg and Corso, Burroughs’s cut-up materials, photography, painting, film and rare publications. It celebrates the Beats’ pursuit of artistic and personal freedom while acknowledging addiction, mental illness, criminality, misogyny and the movement’s limited engagement with feminism and race. The show ultimately presents the Beats as a historically significant, multimedia cultural force whose legacy remains relevant amid contemporary anxieties about freedom and Parisian cultural life.

Scottish novelist and poet William McIlvanney, who died aged 79, is remembered for combining working-class Glaswegian experience with philosophical and literary insight. His novel Docherty won the Whitbread prize, while the Laidlaw crime series made him known as the “godfather of tartan noir” and influenced later writers including Ian Rankin and Val McDermid. The obituary traces his upbringing in Kilmarnock, career as a teacher and writer, major novels and other work, and his lasting influence on Scottish literature.

Robert Zaretsky’s biography presents James Boswell as a paradoxical figure: fascinated by Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume and other Enlightenment thinkers, yet constrained by class, money, religion and deeply illiberal attitudes toward women and belief. The review emphasizes Boswell’s fear of death and his attempts to find evidence for an afterlife, especially during his visit to the dying David Hume. It also criticizes Boswell’s social elitism, notably his dismissal of Robert Burns, and finds Zaretsky’s 288-page study padded and less vivid than Boswell’s own journal.

Scottish poet, essayist and translator Alastair Reid died aged 88. Best known for his 40-year association with The New Yorker, Reid also produced acclaimed translations of Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda and wrote extensively about Spain, Scotland and his friendship with Robert Graves. His life was shaped by wartime service, travel, literary relationships and an opposition to the strict Calvinist culture of his upbringing. A 1984 admission that he had fabricated or rearranged details in some Spanish reportage caused a scandal at The New Yorker, though editor William Shawn supported him. Reid is survived by his second wife, Leslie Clark, his sons, grandchildren and sister.

Robert Crawford’s Bannockburns argues that Scotland’s literary history, from Robert the Bruce and Robert Burns to modern poets, supports independence. The review finds the book informative and authoritative on some writers, especially Burns and Hugh MacDiarmid, but criticizes its pamphleteering tone, selective treatment of nationalism, and inadequate examination of liberty, economics, the Union, and Scotland’s prospective EU and NATO relationships. The reviewer remains undecided, acknowledging the emotional force of independence while noting that Scotland’s cultural flourishing was itself partly enabled by the Union.

Amiri Baraka, born LeRoi Jones, was an influential African-American poet, playwright and critic who moved from New York's Beat literary scene into Black nationalism and became a leading figure in the Black Arts movement. His career included the Obie-winning play Dutchman, influential books on blues and jazz, community theatre in Newark, and teaching and festival work. The obituary also addresses his antisemitic, homophobic and misogynistic statements, his later repudiation of some of those views, arrests and imprisonment, and the controversy over his poem about the 11 September attacks, which led to the abolition of his New Jersey poet laureate position. He died aged 79 and was survived by his wife Amina, five children with her, two daughters from his first marriage and another daughter.

In an interview about American Smoke, Iain Sinclair discusses his daily walks through Hackney, which he sees as a way to refresh perception and generate new writing. He explains how Kerouac, Burroughs, Olson and other Beat and experimental writers shaped his prose, while distinguishing his work from conventional fiction and documentary through his use of memory, invention and historical research. Sinclair describes the Olympic redevelopment of Hackney as an enclosure that disrupted his relationship with the landscape, prompting his literary journey into American writing. He also criticizes mass-media mythology and bureaucratic corporate language, arguing that writers must create independent myths from the materials of their own time.

Carolyn Cassady, an American writer and photographer who died aged 90, was an unwilling but important figure in the Beat Generation through her marriage to Neal Cassady and affair with Jack Kerouac. Her memoirs, photographs and introductions to collections of correspondence documented the volatile relationships surrounding Neal, Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Although Neal was repeatedly unfaithful and sometimes manipulative, she remained attached to him and defended Kerouac. Later in life she settled in Berkshire after living in London and was survived by her three children and descendants.

Albert Murray, who died aged 97, was an African American writer and cultural critic best known for arguing that black culture was central to an inclusive “omni-American” identity. His books examined jazz, blues, literature and American life while rejecting portrayals of African Americans primarily as victims and distancing himself from separatist and Black Power politics. A Tuskegee graduate, former US Army Air Force officer and friend of Ralph Ellison, Murray wrote influential works including The Omni-Americans and Stomping the Blues, as well as novels featuring his alter ego Scooter. Though his discretion limited his public visibility, he received major late recognition, including the National Book Critics Circle lifetime achievement award and Alabama’s Harper Lee award.

Peter Doig’s exhibition at Edinburgh’s Scottish National Gallery is presented as a celebration of the pleasures of figurative oil painting and visual beauty. The show focuses on paintings made after his return to Trinidad, exploring changing light, tropical atmosphere, memory and the ambiguous relationship between observation and symbolism. The review highlights paired works such as Walking Figure by Pool, The Red Boat and Cricket Painting, while questioning whether their imagery should be read politically or primarily as painterly experimentation. Doig’s Scottish, Canadian and Trinidadian identities, along with possible influences from artists including Gauguin, Pierre Bonnard and James Morrice, inform the discussion, but the paintings are ultimately praised for resisting overly intellectual interpretation.

James Campbell reviews Dan Wakefield’s collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s letters, portraying the author as a hugely influential writer whose life was marked by war trauma, family tragedy, addiction, depression, financial problems and troubled relationships. The correspondence illuminates Vonnegut’s candor, anger, humor and recurring regrets, while Slaughterhouse-Five emerges as the decisive work that brought him fame through its treatment of the Dresden bombing. Campbell values the breadth of the collection and Wakefield’s decade-by-decade organization, though he notes that the editorial introductions can sometimes reveal information before the letters do. The review concludes that Vonnegut’s lasting reputation rests chiefly on one classic novel, even as his distinctive voice made many lesser-known books commercially successful.

James Campbell reviews Tate Britain’s exhibition of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s concrete poetry, sculptures and garden designs. He presents Little Sparta in Lanarkshire as Finlay’s major artistic achievement, a cultivated yet permanently revolutionary environment where poetry, landscape, military imagery and classical references create visual paradoxes. The exhibition illuminates themes of order, disorder, war and peace, but its focus and indoor setting limit the range of Finlay’s work. Campbell praises the artist’s clarity, lyricism and playful experimentalism while examining controversies over his conflicts with arts institutions and his use of Nazi and revolutionary iconography.