D.J. Taylor

From teenage delinquent to man of letters: James Campbell’s remarkable career

The literary critic and biographer recalls his nomadic self-education after leaving school in Glasgow aged 15

James Campbell.

The great age of the Scottish autodidact must have ended a century ago, but it had a prodigious impact while it lasted. To read John Gross’s The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (1969) is to be plunged headfirst into a world of kenspeckle lads studying Nietzsche behind the crankshaft and miners quoting Burns to each other as they were winched up from the Lanarkshire coal face.

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