On 13th May, journalist and literary editor Alan Taylor was the Festival guest speaker at Dumbarton Library. Alan is well-known, especially to Sunday Herald readers, as the author of a very witty diary column in which, among other things, he provides amusing but recognisable alternative names for politicians and other public figures and celebrities. He pokes fun at contemporary political and cultural attitudes.

Alan, originally an Edinburgh City librarian, has had, during the course of his subsequent journalism career, the opportunity to interview most leading literary figures of recent times, and his Festival talk consisted of affectionate and extremely amusing anecdotes of the eccentricities of some of his favourites.

Top of the list was Muriel Spark, of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie fame, who became a great friend of Alan’s. Her unusual life-style in her large Tuscany home provide many funny and moving stories. There was the incident when the supremely other-worldly Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean famously tried to make a phone-call with a hair dryer; there was the time when Joseph Heller’s wife was secretly smuggling Scottish folk music records (a pet hate of her husband’s) home to America; the occasion when John Bayley, Iris Murdoch’s husband, saved some restaurant potatoes in his jacket pocket in case of peckishness on his journey home… etc., etc.

Topical (and typical) was Alan’s account of the highly creative expenses claims often made by journalists – the same journalists who now righteously fulminate against the self-serving transgressions of politicians.

It was a very entertaining evening, and one got the impression that Alan Taylor could have spoken in this vein for hours on end.