Alice Crawford sustained me with love and shrewd advice throughout this project, as did our teenage children, Lewis and Blyth. This was true especially when I smashed up my right hand and arm during the last stages—an injury attributable neither to Glasgow nor to Edinburgh. The first section of this book and all the Edinburgh material benefited from being read and commented on by Sara Lodge, whose astute, shaping intelligence and incisive phrasing were gifts to the volume; as a principled Edinburgher, however, she would not be cajoled into reading the chapters on Glasgow. My trusted Glaswegian advisor, Kenneth Dunn, supplied deft advice, provided kind hospitality, and tramped across the city with me more than once as I checked inscriptions on statues; later, David Kinloch commented with characteristic humour and shrewdness on the Glasgow material, looking it over with his painterly poet’s eye. Thanks also to the keen-eyed photographer Norman McBeath for several extended lunches, for a joint foray into the 2011 Edinburgh Art Festival, and for making sure I saw the broken nose of the goddess at the Temple of Hygeia. Over the generations, I owe particular debts to my parents, Nelson and Betty Crawford, who taught me about Glasgow with love and pride; and to Maimie Hamilton, with whom I spent wonderful childhood holidays in Edinburgh: nothing in that twenty-first-century city made quite the same impression on me as seeing, wholly tarnished but improbably still extant by the outer door of her ground-floor tenement flat in Comiston Gardens, the name “Hamilton” on my late Aunt Maimie’s long disused brass bell.
I would like to acknowledge the staff of all the institutions mentioned in this book. I shall not list those again here, but wish to make special mention of some of the libraries whose resources—human, in the form of helpful librarians and archivists, as well as inanimate, in the form of books, film, manuscripts, and photographs—have contributed to my writing. These include the Beinecke Library, Yale University; the Bodleian Library, Oxford University; Birmingham Public Library; Edinburgh City Library; Edinburgh University Library; Glasgow University Library; Harvard University Library; the Library of Congress; the Mitchell Library, Glasgow; the National Library of Scotland; St. Andrews University Library; and the Scottish Poetry Library.
Material from “Ms. of Monte Cassino, Written to Paul the Deacon at Monte Cassino,” in the 1929 edition of Mediæval Latin Lyrics, translated by Helen Waddell, appears in Chapter 4 by kind permission of Louise Anson at Helen Waddell’s Estate.
Thanks to Susan Wallace Boehmer at Harvard University Press, who first sounded me out about the idea which became this book; to Kathleen McDermott, who became my cordial editor at the Press; to the typescript’s three anonymous peer-reviewers; to Maria Ascher, whose expertise helped me craft the copyedited typescript; to Cliff Boehmer for the specially taken photographs; to Isabelle Lewis, who drew the maps; to the resourceful picture researcher at Harvard, Andrew Kinney; and to my always energetic agent, David Godwin of David Godwin Associates, as well as to his colleague in London, Anna Watkins.